Last term I attended the Creating Digital Escape Rooms with Donna Yates toolkit. Donna introduced us to a collection of published digital escape rooms which we had an opportunity to explore. We were also shown how to create our own escape rooms using Google forms.
Here is the link to Donna's presentation. Slides 7-15 have clear steps to follow if you are keen to give this a try.
As a way of putting my new learning into practise and helping my students strengthen their connections to their affixes learning, we created our own affix themed digital escape rooms. The challenge was to devise 10 affix related questions that their peers would then answer in their quest to open an online game that let them apply their new learning in a fun way. The games selected were found using our smart searching skills so are not our own creations. That is one of our next challenges.
This was a fun and practical way of reinforcing learning. Dictionaries were out in full force and the discussion was rich and very loud as questions were being tested on friends orally before being recorded on the Google form. What I liked about this activity was the fact it forced my learners to draw on and recall their new learning, the dictionaries and the books they have been completing challenges in were used purposefully and the whole activity was met with a huge level of enthusiasm. 'Easy' questions were soon pushed to the side as the desire to write the 'hardest' question became the challenge of the day. This activity took two blocks of learning to complete but was absolutely worth it as the 'I've escaped' cheers showed the level of buy-in and allowed my learners to see their own success in real time, and I was able to see just how strong the connections to our new learning are.
We have created a page on our class site for our escape rooms which can be found here.
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