Six Ideas for End-of-Year Review Activities

We’re getting down to the end of the school year. This is when many of us turn our attention to developing end-of-year review activities. Speaking of summer, the first session of the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp is about five weeks away.

Here’s what I’m doing for end-of-year review activities. I hope that you find these ideas helpful.

Common Craft-style Explanations

Nearly fifteen years ago Common Craft created a style of video explanation that uses simple clipart, some basic transition effects, and great script. Watch this video about podcasting to see a demonstration of the style.

To review the key terms and concepts in my networking course, my students will be producing Common Craft-style video explanations. They’ll use Google Slides and Screencastify to do that. Here’s a short demonstration of how they’ll use those tools together.

Online Board Games

The students in one of my classes really enjoy games of all kinds except for Kahoot. They, like many other students, are tired of Kahoot and Kahoot-like games. So I’m going to mix it up by creating an online board game that we’ll play as a group.

Flippity offers a template for creating online board games. With the template you can create a game that includes up to eight players, has up to three dice to roll, and interactive game squares. Your game can also include videos, pictures, Google Drawings, and graphs. Watch this short video to see how you can create and play your own online board game.

Knowt Notes & Practice Quizzes

Knowt is a service that lets you upload documents and have them automatically turned into flashcards and practice quizzes. While I’m not forcing my students to use Knowt to review before their last test, I have shown it to them and some of my students are using it.

Documents imported from Google Drive, from a document stored on your computer, or from any public webpage. Practice quizzes created in Knowt use a mix of multiple choice, matching, and fill-in-the-blank questions. Instant feedback is provided as soon as you submit an answer to a question. At the end of the quiz you can review all questions and their correct answers. You can take the quiz again or have a new practice quiz generated for you.

Here’s a quick video overview of how Knowt works.

Other Ideas

These are not things I’m doing this year, but have done in the past and or have helped others implement.

Puppet shows in Flipgrid:
- Students use puppets to speak as famous people from history.
Fling the Teacher:
- This is a game template from ClassTools.net. Students answer a series of practice quiz questions and at the end they get to digitally fling the teacher across the screen. Here’s a video demo of it.
Digital Scavenger Hunts/ Breakout Games
- Students work together to solve problems as part of a digital scavenger hunt that unlock little rewards. If you have a Breakout EDU account, you might find some good digital challenges there. Otherwise, consider using Flippity’s online scavenger hunt template to create a game in which students solve problems to unlock each part of the game.

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