Who says learning can’t be fun? The kids are always complaining that our classes are “boring” and that our lessons “don’t mean anything.”
And who hasn’t heard the dread statement: “We don’t learn anything in here, anyway.”
I found out during one class today that learning (and fun!) can happen in environments where learning isn’t supposed to happen — homeroom. See, during the past few weeks we’ve been in the midst of the first round of state-level testing. This means that our regular classes are a little shorter, and that our homeroom period is an awful lot longer, so as to allow us 80 minutes of continuous testing. And in order to ensure every student in the school has the opportunity to take those tests, our testing window (and our lengthy homeroom periods) lasts for more than a month. This creates one giant problem for every teacher at our school — we have to endure our homeroom students for an hour and a half every day for a month. This makes that class tiring, and it brings out the worst in both students and teachers.
The other teachers on my team suggested that we switch homeroom classes each day we are not testing, so as to liven things up a bit. At first it seemed like a great idea, but after a few days I realized that all those other homeroom students weren’t having any fun in my class. I’m not a very fun guy. I don’t know how to make origami, like a few of the other teachers; I’m not as well versed in trust games (trust walks and trust falls) as other teachers; and when it comes to giving lessons about other cultures and having the kids participate in cultural anthologies, I’m just not capable.
Internet garbage? That’s right up my alley.
The first few homerooms sat with me through a presentation of two class websites I set up to help aid in my Language Arts Classroom and to keep a “Living Yearbook” of the activities and fun we have in school — pictures, links, videos, etc. Once we’ve gone through those sites and I’ve talked about getting parental permission for the students to write on these sites and post pictures of themselves, I usually just show off a bunch of funny and cool videos from Google Video or YouTube. But that fun was cut short the moment the school blocked YouTube. Then, the day after Google acquired Youtube, Google Video became a blocked site.
And yet I had to entertain the students.
Enter blufr, a simple website that poses to its readers a series of trivia questions, and asks only that the participants choose between True and False. Except blufr is a little hipper than that, and uses the choices of no way! and way! Simple as that. If you get answer a question correctly, you get points. An incorrect answer subtracts from your score.
the questions aren’t completely obscure, but most important — they’re fun.
And no matter whether you answer correctly or incorrectly, the site gives you a little more information about the answer. Check out this example question (click the image!):
And then check out the answer (click the image!):
Fun stuff! Educational stuff! And this simple website kept the students from another homeroom entertained for nearly an hour and a half.
And at the risk of the word “etertained” being a little offensive, I’d also like to point out that these kids were in teams racing for a prize — if a team answered a question correctly they got another question, and another question if they answered that one correctly, and so on. But the most fascinating thing I saw today was that every team was working to help the other teams answer questions. the kids were all shouting out the answers to each other. The teams were working to ensure someone got the answer correct, and when any team answered incorrectly, they sat and read about WHY they were wrong.
When the kids got a quesiton they bandied about their reasonings, and they brought up items of knowledge they’ve learned through other sources. “I learned about this from Mr. Baldy!” “I heard about this on the news!” “Dude, someone just wrote about this on their MySpace blog!” “I heard about this on The Daily Show!”
maybe the kids left with a litle more education, a little more knowledge. Maybe only a few left with the one nugget: Ashton Kutcher has webbed feet! But they all left a little entertained and a little more knowledgeable about a variety of facts. (Like: Theodore Roosevelt shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch)
This last quesiton is a great example of student ingenuity — one member of the group pulled off her jacket and read through the label to find the company’s statement of “Since 1892″ and then searched through their available books to find out whether Teddy Roosevelt was alive during that time.
The answer: You’re right: Abercrombie and Fitch, founded in 1892, was an elite sporting goods retailer for many years. Even US President Teddy Roosevelt got suited up for his African safaris at Abercrombie and Fitch.
Filed under: Fun Stuff (yay!), New Stuff, links, students
[...] See, all Iwanted to do was play a game with the kids. A fun little online game called blufr. And the kids were cool except for the fact that I had to rein them over and over before we could start the game. And the game went fine until somewhere around the third questions (or four minutes) when one student yelled across the classroom: “DAVE LOVES BOYS!” [...]