Week 5: Thing 11

So the IQ quiz is cool if you want to wrack your brain for state capital and teach geography, but it's not very practical in an English classroom. I looked through the list of suggested sites they provide, and I think they've left out some of the more helpful ones. Ellen sent out an invite last year to a bookshelf website that would prove useful in an English classroom. It allows students to post books they've read, show what books they own to loan out, and even a place to post book reviews which is already an assignment I have them do on paper. Of course, to go back to my same point, this is a great website, but it's impractical because it's one more place to go. Facebook has developed nearly the same software that allows me to include the same information and then immediately share it with my facebook friends. Two benefits of this are that 1) I can share it with a pre-established group rather than having to send additional invites 2) it's housed in a website I already visit reducing the number of websites I have to go to.

Another website they've left off is called www.sporcle.com. It's a great website with a variety of quizzes that students can use to learn more about a subject or even quiz themselves on trivia. One that was recently posted is http://www.sporcle.com/games/leomontg/nineteen_eighty_four# This one is actually a very good quiz on the book 1984 that I could give my students. The quizzes are often user produced making it a great web 2.0 resource that you could use in and adapt to your classroom. It's a fun way you could create online quizzes for your kids and even your friends.