Jeopardy Labs

Jeopardylabs.com is a free* website that allows you to build Jeopardy-style games.  You choose how many categories and how many questions.  This is a fun way to review and practice vocabulary, numbers, and very basic grammar.

*For a one-time (lifetime) subscription fee of $20, you gain the ability to upload images, videos and sound (if hosted on a public site such as SoundCloud or YouTube), and to make your games private.  (Games made with free accounts are all public.)

Working with beginning-level learners, I use a lot of images for vocabulary practice, so the one-time $20 payment was well worth it.  

The popularly-known Jeopardy game on U.S. television gives the answer, and then participants must identify and ask the question.  For English learners, I reverse this:  the question is provided and the learner gives the answer.

In addition to identifying vocabulary words from images, I use categories such as:

• singular or plural?

• name 3 [parts of the body, cities in Oregon, colors, days of the week, etc.]

• what comes next?  [10, 20, 30, ___; Monday, Tuesday, _______; March, April, _____]

• starts with [a color that starts with B; a body part that start with H; a city that starts with V]

• missing letters

• how many syllables

Pros: Fairly easy to create games; easy to modify and re-use; flexible; can be played cooperatively (no teams), individually, or with teams; no ads (non-commercial)

Cons: For images and privacy there's a one-time $20 payment; you can only add your own audio or video if it's hosted on a public site such as SoundCloud or YouTube.