Jeopardy Labs

  Today, I used Jeopardy Labs, a wonderful site filled with templates and already written games for the classroom.  I needed games for all my math classes and I found the games ready to go.  It was fantastic and I played them on my smart board.

The game came ready to go.  All I needed to do was input the number of teams and hit the start button.   Once the game came up, It was ready to go.  The page come up and its got the topics, amounts from 100 to 500 and the score appears at the bottom.  You as the teacher tap the + button if the students are correct and - if they are incorrect. 

In addition, when the students choose the topic and amount they want, they get a problem with a button underneath to show the correct answer or go back to the choices.  I ran it so if a team was wrong, I took the points off and allowed other people to try for the answer.

Most of the students in Pre-Algebra had a great time and worked so hard on the distributive property, combining like terms using addition, subtraction, or both, and simplifying expressions.   I have a couple who won't even try because they don't like trying it if they perceive it as too hard but the rest had a great time.

For Algebra I, I found one on solving multi-step equations that might require the distributive property, combining like terms, variables on both sides of the equal sign.  My students had a wonderful time and I discovered that one of my students who always took her time, actually can work a lot faster.

In Geometry, I had the students use one that required them to calculate volume, lateral area, or surface area for cylinders, prisms, cones, pyramids, or sphere. It was great because it helped students become more fluent in using the basic formulas and knowing which formula to use.

My students in Algebra II got to practice factoring quadratics both with a leading coefficient of 1 or other number, finding GCF's, factoring quadratics with GCF's and solving systems of equations.  It was great.  They all worked hard to be the first one but most of the time, the first one had the wrong answer.  This class set the lowest score at -2000 because of that.

In addition to having a large number of pre-made jeopardy games, it is also set up so you can create your own games for free.  You simply create a password and off you go.  The password is so you can go back in and edit the game.  If you decide to invest $20, you get more templates to work with, control over privacy and deleting the game, and you get a list of everything you have created.  Otherwise, it becomes public domain and available on Google.

I did not need to make any games at all.  I found everything I wanted but I found them by using the Google search engine.  The site has no search engine so its much harder and I do not want to go through over 300 games to find out exactly what I want. 

I plan to use this site again. Go check it out for yourself.