With all the testing, assemblies, and various schedules in a 5-12 public school, teachers invariably end up having to supervise a group of students they may not even teach for an hour or two without any real lesson plan. When that happens, I’ve discovered an activity that keeps the students engaged and requires no real planning on your part (unless you want to).
Jeopardy Labs provides a web-based jeopardy experience. It works best if you have access to an interactive whiteboard and projector, but it could possibly work OK without them. All it takes is to go to the website, type in a topic (e.g. chemistry review), and it searches through hundreds of teacher-created jeopardy-style games. Find one you like and get started. It’s that easy.
It’s also super-easy to create your own jeopardy game. It’s great because there’s no software to install–just use your web browser. You can even use HTML to incorporate things like images, subscripts, bold, italics, etc. Maybe someday Jeopardy Labs will incorporate a rich text editor onto their site to make those things easier.
I also just got access to an Education Insights Eggspert – like a buzzer system to tell who buzzed in first. I’ll try using that this year for review activities–previously I’d let everyone respond on a personal whiteboard and maybe give double points to the team/individual who got the answer first. But my students tend to get very competitive so it causes problems when two people respond at about the same time. Anyway, I’ll try the Eggspert and let you know how it goes.
Another alternative available the last few years: Kahoot: https://kahoot.com/
Requires students to have a device to answer (phone, tablet, laptop, computer, etc.) and you to have a projector to show the question.