The task this week was to find a website that uses games to teach concepts, specifically reading and writing. I chose to highlight one of my favorite sites for educational purposes: Sporcle.com.
In looking for sites, I found that many of them targeted an elementary audience, an obvious problem for someone going into secondary education. Sporcle is informative and fun regardless of age. The site features quizzes on anything from Shakespeare to pop culture to word puzzles. The site grew from a few guys who love Jeopardy!, crossword puzzles, and anything trivia-oriented in an effort to build their own knowledge bases.
Users can create their own quizzes, a feature that would be especially helpful to educators. I can see using quizzes to help students understand plot lines in book/plays (see this quiz on Othello) or keeping track of characters. There are also plenty of opportunities to match authors to different works of literature (see here), a study tool that would be extremely handy for students before tests.
Heather,
ReplyDeleteI also noticed that most of the games were targeted towards elementary age. I think that this is when the creativity of the teacher has to come in. Make up your own game that will appropriately gain the attention of your class.
My journalism teacher in high school would always have us play games as a class. Even though we were in high school, we loved them...but none of them were on-line.