When students were creating their usernames, I made sure they understood it would show up on the leaderboard that everyone could see. I reminded them that if they wanted to be anonymous they shouldn't make their username obvious. Zondle also assigns an avatar to each student; they had a blast customizing it's hair, eye color, skin, and headgear. I loved seeing the students' personalities come out in their usernames and avatars. After students created their account, I asked them to take care of one last piece of business- filling out a Google Form which asked them for their name and the username that they chose for Zondle account (so I know who is who!).
In just two days, these kids are addicted and having so much fun! When they finish a game, they are paid in "zollars" (zondle dollars??). Based on their cumulative zollar amount, a leaderboard is automatically updated and they can see how they rank against their peers. When students successfully finish a game, they are paid somewhere in the 100-200 zollar range (depends on game and amount of questions, I think). In just 48 hours, my kids have battled it out and the leaders now have over 22,500 zollars! It's awesome that they are spending their spare time playing and studying my class content.
More about the Game
Another thing I noticed is that when the question is thrown back into the mix, the answer choices are scrambled so they student cannot just remember the location of the correct answer since it would say something different next time.
I'm not sure exactly how Zondle decides how much to pay out but I think (and tell the students) that it's a mix between how well they did in the game (they rack up points during the "play breaks") and how accurate they are answering the questions.
With 49 games to choose from and working at their own pace, personalization is at its best! Student can choose sports themed games, to ones that rely on quick clicking skills, to paced and creative ones like building a pizza. The "play breaks" don't have any connection to the content and stay the same, no matter which topic is being played. Zondle simply plugs your topic questions into whichever game the students choose. Therefore, students will answer a couple questions then get a "play break" ranging from ten seconds to about a minute or two, then answer some more questions, and so on until they have answered all questions correctly on the first try.
My favorite comment of the day was when one of my kids came up to me, after checking that no one could overhear him, and whispered, "Ms. Cuje I found a way to cheat and rack up points quickly... The last one is just the questions so you don't have to waste your time playing the game part and you can finish quickly and get lots of zollars." I tried so hard to keep from laughing out loud! Instead I said, "I'm okay with that kind of cheat." How ironic is it that I found this awesome resource to make answering questions fun and he wanted to skip the fun parts!
In addition to personalization, I go a step further and differentiate if I wanted to based on the "classes" I set up. I could assign students to a class based on their readiness level (high, medium, and low) instead and create tiered question sets (called "topics"). Students see the topics that are assigned to them so who's to say that everyone needs to get the same exact questions?
So what's so special about the Zollars... why do kids care so much?
Looking to the Future
Another thing that I thought was cool but I am not going to elaborate on it right now, is that you can assign zollars as "behavior rewards" even when students are not playing the games. In other words, Zondle could be an integral part of your management strategy even if you are not playing the games all the time. Also they have badges that you can reward students with but I have not explored that since I use Schoology, an LMS that already has badges build in.
In the future, I also hope to explore the tracking of student data. I have noticed that you can see which "topics" (aka question sets) students are playing, and you can even drill down to the individual level to see what questions were the weakest. I have not seen aggregated data yet at the whole class level.
Lastly, Zondle is offering the opportunity for educators to become "Teacher Partners" with them and earn real money via pay pal for creating content... pretty cool and hey, I'm making it anyway so why not! There is a marketplace where you can buy content in the form of "zondle packs" so that you do not have to start from scratch all the time.
I will post more in the future to update on trial/error tips and other concerns we come across, along with any solutions that we find. Whew! Are you still with me? I'm impressed, I guess I can be a bit long-winded. But I hope you found this info helpful :) Do you zondle in your classroom? If so, share your ideas!
Oh and I forget to mention that zondle has what is called "Zondle Challenge" that works like socrative, kahoot, or any other type of clicker system using devices as the remots AND they have a whole-class game show type activity called Zondle Team Play. I have yet to test those out.