Spice Up a Review Session with Classtools.net

The Holiday season is here, which means that finals and reviews sessions are rapidly approaching. Russel Tarr has put together a versatile site that you can use to spice up a review session. At a recent Digital Age Learning meeting Bill Bell introduced Fakebook, which is a fun way for students to organize and present information they learned in a unit. Bill had students create “Fakebook” pages to demonstrate what they learned during their Progressive unit in US History. Here is a student sample from Bill’s US History class.

Classtools.net has many other great functions as well. Instead of doing a traditional review sheet, you can use Classtools.net to create a QR code scavenger hunt. The site provides you with everything you need to create the QR codes. You simply type out review questions and answers into the site and it generates the QR codes for you to print out and place around the school. Next, organize your class into small teams (2 to 4 in each group works best) and make sure at least one person in each group has a cell phone, iPod, or iPad to scan in the QR codes. Finally, let students loose to find and scan in each QR code. Students will be presented with a question for each QR code they scan, which they answer as a team (click here for a sample graphic organizer that students fill out during the activity). The first team to come back with all questions correctly answered wins! Click here to view a sample scavenger hunt.

Classtools.net also has an arcade game generator. Similar to the QR code generator, you type out questions and answers directly into the generator and it produces a variety of arcade games. You are limited in terms of the types of questions you can ask, however I have found this to be a great anchor activity for the end of the semester. If students are working on summative projects you can direct them to the review games as they finish up projects at different times. In addition, you can have a one or two review days where the entire class competes to earn the highest score. Click here to see some sample arcade games for a high school economics class. My personal favorite is Manic Miner!