I chose the game FreeRice which was shown to the class by Olivia. It's a neat little non-profit website that will generously donate ten grains of rice for every question you answer correctly on their site. FreeRice runs off advertisement money they received form sponsors They offer a multitude of subjects that participants may answer questions in with a variety of different difficulty levels.
As an English teacher I would implement this game (particularly the grammar portion) for students to use in addition to classroom learning. This could aid in reinforcing concepts that I have already taught and might encourage students to continue their education outside of the classroom. I could assign homework with the guidelines that each students shows me a 'receipt' of a pre-set number of rice grains donated. I feel this will be a more entertaining homework assignment than the usual vocab worksheet most teachers might assign. The vocabulary portion could also be used, but I feel would be less helpful because it is much more ambiguous than grammatical concepts. I plan to teach high school but I think this would work better when used with younger children. All the while, I still think anybody could pull something from this great website.
I particularly like the fact that this website serves two ultimate purposes: to educate and to end world hunger. While students are working on their grammar or vocabulary they can know that their work is actually contributing to help somebody in need.
Couldn't you also take advantage of teaching about world hunger (perhaps incorporate in a work of literature being studied) while practicing vocab/grammar and/or for the older students have them create some alternative 'questions' of their own that could either be submitted to FreeRice or used to create their own game....
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