The site offers all kinds of games that help students in every grade level brush up on their studies.
Fifth grade students in Dottie Pownall's classroom at Orchard View Elementary in Martinsburg are playing Probability Pond, a math game offered on the Learn21 website that features a big green frog.
The frog can eat fireflies in colors of blue, yellow, purple and red. The students have to determine what the probability is that the frog will eat a particular color.The students take turns guessing the answer and entering it on a large smart board in front of the room.
Special education teacher Sharon Collins leads the exercise. Collins incorporates as much technology as she can in her lessons.
"Almost every day we find something on-line through Learn21 or other resources and incorporate it into our classroom," Collins said.
"With having an inclusion classroom we have students who have vision problems. We have students who have speech problems, learning problems. We have an autistic student in our class and then we also have regular ed students and it really appeals to their different type of learning styles."
The West Virginia Education Department started Learn21 two years ago. The website offers online games that go along with the cirriculum. Teachers can use the games in class and students can access the website from home if they want to practice some more.
Donna Landin, the department's E-learning coordinator, says Learn21 is meant to help students in a variety of ways.
"They could find content on the web site, go into that content, complete a game or an interactivity that went right along with what they were learning in their classroom so it was either supplemental or it helped them get at areas where they were having some problems or it could accelerate their learning," Landin said.
Learn21 also offers the opportunity to review material.
"They can go back and pick up concepts that they had gone over formerly, maybe previous grades or earlier in the year that they needed to refresh," Landin said. "Or perhaps they missed that concept totally and they really needed some re-teaching but in a fun engaging interactive way that perhaps would be presented differently than what they had seen it before."
Landin works with students in a special class at Horace Mann Middle School in Charleston. The class meets before school two days a week.
Two years ago the students looked for on-line educational games that fit the curriculum. Landin wanted the students to test the activities for the education department.
This year, the students are designing a game that will help eighth graders with West Virginia history and will prepare them to take the Golden Horseshoe exam.
Eighth grader Isaac Liu says one of the first decisions the class had to make is what kind of game it would be.
"Like for example would it be a treasure hunt, or a mystery," Liu said.
Sixth grader Elana liu says sometimes games are mapped on paper before going on the computer.
"We have to kind of draw out what we want it to look like on the computer and sometimes, when we were working on level two, we kind of made a poster that had everything we wanted to be on the screen on it so that we could see what it would look like," she said.
And designing the game involves a lot of research. Isaac Liu says for the first level they each had to gather information about topics like islands, railroads, rivers and important conflicts in the state's history.
"We researched the topic, we wrote a little about it and found some related images to go with that and then we moved on to level two," he said. "Level two was about counties so for these counties we would write a study describing for example facts and famous people and what the main industry in that county is and other items like that."
Donna Landin said the games are available for students to use for homework or when there's a snow day and even over the summer. The education department also encourages teachers to incorporate them into the school day.
"Not that all students have to be using the same content or the same resource but they could break their students into small groups and have them engaged in activities that go along with different things that they happen to be teaching," Landin said.
"Some students could be using resources that have them review concepts that need to be reviewed, some students could be working on current material and other students could be accelerated and moving forward," she said.
The students in this classroom at Orchard View Intermediate School seem to enjoy learning math through games like Probability Pond.
"I think it's a good website because it has lots of resources kids can use so if they have any trouble with math they'll get better," Amy Navarro said.
"I think the web site is really helpful especially for me because I have trouble with math," Tanner Boeckmann said. "I think it's good because it's better than just looking in the book, reading out of the textbook, you actually get to watch something. It's fun while you're getting to learn math."
"Our kids today they are very digitally aware," Collins said. "They're used to playing games; they're used to doing things on the computer."
Collins said the visual aspect of computer games is more appealing to kids.
"This is how they're learning nowadays," she said. "The paper and pencil does not give them the motivation lots of times whereas when we're doing something visual, something that they have to go up and interact with it appeals to them and I think it helps with their learning styles and to be more successful in the classroom."
The education department is continuously adding content to the Learn21 web site and usage has grown over the past two years.
Landin said the site gets more than two thousand hits a day with the highest usage in Charleston, Martinsburg, Logan and Morgantown and Landin hopes even more schools log on in the future.
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