Body parts.
I recently followed a tweet (a message on Twitter) from Dai Barnes to his Diigo bookmark list (Diigo is like Delicious, but you can annotate pages with highlighters, etc.) and found several interesting resources. The most immediately useful was Sanfields Free Flash Resources for Teachers.
This site links to several popular classroom games including Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Wheel of Fortune, and Matching, all of which pull questions from an XML file, which means they can be customized for your words and phrases! Instructional videos for doing this are linked from the website.
There are also some handy little gizmos like a clickable traffic light, which could be used to give non-verbal feedback to students, and a customizable wheel of fortune for making random choices, picking teams, questions, etc.
There are also a few games tailored specifically to the interactive whiteboard-equipped classroom. One of these is a fridge magnet letters game which allows students to drag and drop letters of their choosing. Another, which I think is even more ingenious, is called Rouleaux. It works like a slot machine with three spinning reels (a two-reel version is also available) which randomly selects topics from a given category. The results of each spin can be used to generate ideas for roleplaying, impromtu speeches, and many other activities. Again, the best part is that the game is cutomizable; You can choose different combinations of reels (for example, the “body” reel at left) and even create your own. How great!
I’m thrilled to have found activities that are so customizable. Being able to adapt and change them makes these resources exponentially more valuable.
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What a great find, Chris! Thanks a lot for sharing, this looks absolutely fantastic!
I can’t wait to give the Who wants To Be A Millionaire quiz maker a go. Sounds excellent!
How easy do you think it is to use? Do you think teachers with little ICT experience would be able to pick it up? (many of those I train aren’t too comfortable with computers.)
Anyhow, once agian, thanks for a great post!
Seth.
Glad you’re as enthusiastic as I am about some of these activities. I haven’t tried any of them yet, but there seem to be decent instructions on how to tweak the content of the activities. It sounds like editing an XML file is really all that’s needed, so basic cut-and-paste skills should do it. I’m not sure if there is much more involved in terms of uploading the game and XML file to a server, but that part of the process may be intimidating to some.
I’m more interested in the Rouleax / Slot Machine game as a way to generate discussion and role play topics. I’m working with a colleague to create reels that suit her vocabulary book. I’ll post an update if / when it’s ready to go. Please let me know about your experience with the Millionaire game if you do decide to tweak it.
Chris
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Links are dead 😦
Any updates?
It looks like most of the games and activities are still available at http://www.npted.org/schools/sandfieldsComp/games/Pages/default.aspx.