Final exams and End of Course, EOC, exams are upon us. How to review a full year's content with students while making it interesting and relevant is a real challenge. Review packets and Jeopardy reviews are still popular, but how does a student own this learning, and how does a teacher know whether all students are participating and how each is functioning? Two great interactive review sites are StudyStack.com and Quizlet.com
Background Info
At the West Ashley Advanced Studies Magnet in Charleston County School District, Chad Rentz and his 7th grade team partners -- Cassandra Lock, Jayuntay Williams, and Jamie Schmidt -- solved this problem using iPads and StudyStack.com, an interactive quizzing system. The full team of students, around 100, converged on the cafeteria for a March Madness-style competition. Using the website freebracketgenerator.com, Rentz created a bracket for 4-man teams to compete against one another using an online quizzing system, StudyStack.com. He created a review stack for 7th grade South Carolina standards, and the students applied their knowledge of the terms and definitions using the timed matching activity. After the science round, the social studies round by Ms. Lock ensued.
Meaningful Exercises
Keeping the survivors on task was easy; it was the eliminated players who presented the greatest challenge. To keep everyone focused on the review, eliminated players gathered in one area and were given a chance to win consolation prizes by continuing to review using standards-based questions through StudyStack again. This time, the exercises were not timed, and students had to type in the correct answers to questions. See directions sheet below.
The silence and focus throughout the cafeteria was shocking. These were students who would not have filled out a review packet had it been given to them, and yet they were all focused on standards-based questions. On the SAMR scale for technology use, this would have come it at a base level of substitution or maybe augmentation for the ease of workflow, but there was something else going on here. The competitive quality of the exercise hooked these eighth graders and raised their level of interest. Because they bought into it, they were willing to interact with the content in a way that had not occurred up to this point this year.
Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance
Can other teachers have a successful event like this one? Of course they can. This event was brainstormed, planned, and completed in a week's time. These teachers knew their kids; they knew what to expect if left to their own devices, no pun intended. As a result, a few extra adults were called in for back up support; consolation exercises were planned which allowed students to review the information and complete the exercises as many times as they chose to master the content. If you are looking for some creative and fun ways to use your technology to help engage students, I recommend studystack.com and quizlet.com with team competitions as well as other creative applications.
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