ClassTools has long been a favorite resource of mine for creating all kinds of fun, online activities for social studies classes. As the new school year approaches it’s a good time to take a look at seven of my favorite ClassTools games and activities templates.
Play Your Dates Right is one of the templates that I like to use to create a game that is focused on helping students recall the sequence of historical events. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create a simple timeline-based game with the Play Your Dates Right template from ClassTools.net.
The Dust Bin game template from ClassTools lets you create a review game in which students sort answer choices into four categories. It’s a template that is easy to follow to quickly make a review game for your students to play. In the following video I demonstrate how to use the Dust Bin game template from ClassTools.
The Connect Fours template on ClassTools.net lets you create a Connect Four game that provides students with instant feedback. To create your own Connect Fours game head to the game page and select “create new game.” On the next screen enter the terms that you want displayed on your game along with the title for the groupings of terms. Your game will be assigned its own URL that you can distribute however you see fit. Watch my video below to see how it works.
The ClassTools Hexagons Generator lets you create an online hexagonal learning activity to share with your students. To use the template just enter a topic then a minimum of five terms related to that topic. For example, I entered the topic of “American Revolution” then entered the terms “Stamp Act,” “Sugar Act,” “Boston Tea Party,” “Intolerable Acts,” and “Olive Branch Petition.” The generator then created five hexagons that my students can arrange online to show the connections between the topics. Students can also edit the hexagons to add explanations to the connections.
The Classtools Fake SMS Generator is free to use and does not require students to register to use it. In the video below I demonstrate how to create a fictitious text message exchange between historical characters. As I mention in the video below, the Fake SMS Generator could also be used to create visuals for lessons on cyber-safety and etiquette.
The Random Name Picker and the Fruit Machine are two tools that can be used in almost every classroom setting. Both tools can be used to select names or numbers at random. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use both of those tools.
The Wikipedia Timeline Generator will take a Wikipedia article and generate a timeline based on that article. That’s not all it does. You can edit the entries on the timeline to correct dates, to edit the information associated with the dates, delete entries on the timeline, and add new dates to the timeline. Timelines created with the Wikipedia Timeline Generator can be embedded into web pages and or shared with the unique URL assigned to your timeline. In the short video embedded below I demonstrate how to use the Wikipedia Timeline Generator hosted by ClassTools.
