Blended play games, for students... by students!

If you have been using Blended Play content and enjoying the experience with your students, you might be thinking of other ways to incorporate the games in daily lessons. What about if your students were in charge of providing the content?

Student-created content, such as quizzes, is great way to make them reinvest what they have learned and confirm their understanding of the material through the development of the assessment. It allows them to reflect on what were the most important parts of the lessons and what they should remember. After that, they practice phrasing questions in ways that invites a clear answer on targeted content.
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On the teacher side, student-created content allows teachers to see where their students are placing their focus and if they might need to review parts of the content or shift the emphasis of their lessons if they missed the mark on what should be retained from the instruction.

Susan Lynn, a teacher from Missouri with a clear interest (and talent!) for involving her students in the use of classroom technology explains to us how she was able to leverage the Blended Play games as a whole group content-creation activity.

I teach high school Spanish 1 and 2. I first heard about Blended Play from an education group on Facebook and thought it sounded fun.  My kids love games, but they get tired of playing the same ones all the time. The Sushi game looked like a good place to start. I made a data file myself and played it with a small group of kids during study hall to figure out how it all worked. The strategy involved doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense until you actually play it with other people. They really enjoyed it and wanted to make their own games.  My students sit in table groups of 4, so I had one student in each group make a free account. The others worked collaboratively on a Google doc to make their questions. Spanish 1 only did simple Spanish to English pairs for questions, but Spanish 2 created more detailed questions to answer. The student with the account copy/pasted the questions into the data file to get the game ready for the next day. Working together it took about 20 minutes for 3 kids to come up with at least 20 questions.  I circulated around the room reading questions to check for accuracy, suggest improvements, and to answer questions about how the game worked.  The next day the students played the Sushi game, which took about 15 minutes, then they tried the Viking game. Each group shared their data file with me and I was able to upload them to my Google site so they could play each other's games.

​- Susan Lynn, Liberty North High School, Liberty, Missouri.

​Do you use online content in innovative ways in your classroom? How do you get your students involved in the design process of games and activities?

Featured Educator

Susan Lynn is a Spanish teacher and the Department Chair for International Languages at Liberty North High School in Liberty, Missouri. She completed her BSEd and MS in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Kansas and an MS in Differentiated Instruction at William Jewell College.  Susan was awarded the Foreign Language Association of Missouri's Distinguished Educator Award for 2017 and will serve as the Teacher of the Year for Missouri at the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Language.

Blended Play is looking for some collaborators for the Edtech blog. Do you have ideas and opinions that you would like to share with your peers? Are you rocking your classroom with some creative new ways to teach and would like to share? If so, send us an email at [email protected].