All of the students in my school need the classroom Jeopardy set, an extra remote and scoreboard for overcrowded classrooms, and an extra cartridge so we can save our own tests!
This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
Many of the public high schools which service a majority of minority students are failing. It's a sad but realistic fact. We can't blame the students or the system, we need to educate ourselves as teachers to learn the most effective and beneficial ways to impart our knowledge to the hopeful retention of our students. I think I have the key.
Students today are more literate in video games, online chatting, and text messaging than they are in literacy as we know it. The trick to getting students to be on the same page as us educators is to meet them halfway. Using interactive technological games to both showcase and review information is the quickest and most reliable answer to bridging the educational gap. Unfortunately, many schools like mine simply don't have the extra budget for "enrichment" tools that could actually be more beneficial for student engagement and retention than textbooks.
You see, interaction, technology, and competition is the best way to keep students' waning attention spans focused on the lesson and the skills at hand. Jeopardy now makes a classroom interactive game that allows teachers to create Jeopardy games, and allows four teams of students to compete and vie for intellectual attention and showcasing the progression of their knowledge. It's ingenious, really, because the Jeopardy people have it all figured out - but only the richest schools can afford it, when sometimes those students already have an intrinsic motivation to succeed. The students at my school would benefit from this generous gift more than you would realize, because it makes learning FUN and it makes them WANT (key word) to remember what they've learned so they are in competition for the review game.
I know it's a lot to ask. I know it seems peripheral to the crux of education, but I promise you, it would make a world of difference. I'm an English teacher at the school, but I wouldn't renegade it for myself - I'd share with science, math, reading departments in so that every single student in my public high school on the South Side of Chicago would have a chance to benefit from an ingenious way to bridge that educational gap.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Rushek and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.