Ixchell Reyes 0:00
The DIESOL podcast

Brent Warner 0:02
Developing Innovation English as a Second or Other Language,

Ixchell Reyes 0:05
Episode 90: Making game shows with Ryan O’Donnell.

Brent Warner 0:23
Welcome to DIESOL This is Episode 90, we are your hosts. I’m Brent Warner.

Ixchell Reyes 0:27
And I’m Ixchell Reyes and the Summer is almost over I think

Brent Warner 0:31
is I think it’s there is an actual date that the summer ends on. So just I’m ready for fall because in Japan that CO comes which is the changing of the leaves, which you don’t get in Southern California. Absolutely beautiful. So, Ixchell I think we’re gonna jump right into things today. Today we have special guest, Mr. Ryan O’Donnell. That

Ryan O’Donnell 1:03
Da-da-da! insert sound effect here.

Brent Warner 1:07
Yeah, so So Ryan, we were telling you a pre show. We don’t have any sound effects available. We have to make them all with our mouth. And so welcome to the show. Ryan. Ryan is a video production teacher at Rockland High School for 20 something years, is that right? I stopped counting after 20. And that’s the entire bio that you gave to us.

Ryan O’Donnell 1:32
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, my quick thing is that I did I mean, I’ve been for a lot of us, you get in for one reason. And then you modify and you evolve. I started out wanting to get an education to be a high school football teacher. And then realize that doesn’t pay so then got to, hey, Social Studies teacher then from social studies, teaching started to do techy fun things. And then, you know, did that for about 1314 years, got out and became a Tosa for a while and then the school I was at said, Hey, would you like doing techy video stuff? So do you want to start doing broadcasting and film and I’m like, Oh, my goodness. So this will be this will be how I’m going to do my the third act of my career, I believe is doing this.

Brent Warner 2:12
Yeah. And Ryan, we’re friends through cue. And, you know, some of these organizations with all and I’ve seen you do lots of presentations on video production and doing these things. And your your your sessions are always just packed out because you have all these fun, interesting things for people to kind of do and to play with. You kind of work on more interactive stuff with everybody. Right?

Speaker 3 2:34
Yeah, the interactive piece is something that I found most I think the inspiration for a lot of what I did primarily was with those years in social studies, when my biggest the thing I spent most of my human capital on was my I taught AP World History. And I started the year it was first opened, I think it was Oh 102 I think is when I started that. And it’s a bear of a class. I mean, the AP curriculum is really tough. And one of the interesting parts about AP though, was that we had our test, the national exam was on like early May. And our school was out in early June. So I had a month, which was kind of neat. And that was this, like, nobody cares at this point. But also like we can’t sit around and do nothing. And that was this. That was this incubator for me to start doing the Hey, we got a month and I got some really top notch kids who adjust, they’ll do stuff. And every year we were doing some different one year where we were doing Hey, let’s go back in time and do history news broadcasts. And so these kids were doing the, you know, the Kubler cons defense of the Mongol invasion, another group was doing, you know, the black plague and other group was doing Aztecs, the Aztecs and Cortes, and they would go around and like that was fun. And the next time I’m going to do let’s do like a documentary using iPads and doing all that. So it was it was was really interesting idea, a way for me to be able to start dabbling and playing with things and that just has kind of evolved in the what you had mentioned to Brent was about, like, how can I get kids and even adults as well, just interacting and being in being a doer?

Brent Warner 4:08
Yeah, I think it works really well because one of the things we’ve seen at cue several times you’ve done these events and I’ve kind of been on the sidelines helping out a little bit but people really engage with with these types of activities that you’ve been building over time and today we’re actually talking about your game shows that you’re building out and you’ve been doing this so Oh, listener. We got to do the promotional side of things listeners, if you listen through to the episode, you’re gonna get some sort of very awesome freebie but you have to listen for the keyword no fast forwarding it has been disabled. I don’t know how you disable it on all podcast platforms

Speaker 3 4:47
but you are unable some people are trying right now. Oh how did they do that? Have taken over my phone.

Brent Warner 4:55
It’s a great you know, you just have to know the right people. That’s that’s the way to do Do it. So you’ve got these games. And they’ve been, you know, tons of fun, but people get engaged with them. People totally started having fun with them. And so today we wanted to talk a little bit about building out these kind of their PowerPoint based games. Is that right? Usually,

Speaker 3 5:18
yeah, pretty much it is PowerPoint or Google Slides. Okay,

Brent Warner 5:21
PowerPoint, or Google Slides, bass games. And so today, we’re going to talk a little bit about some of those gifts, maybe do some walkthroughs on how they work a little bit, maybe if people want to know or start seeing how they can kind of get into it, and maybe start building their own if they’re interested. But before any of that, Ryan, you had said that there was a, you had some sort of language, language learning experience cut tied in with all of this, I’m gonna just

Speaker 3 5:46
get a quick story. That was what you guys were talking about. We were talking about language and such. And in the dual language, and I only speak one, I only speak English, but I can. So I, to back up, I mentioned like, my journey was to be a football, high school football coach. Before that, I had no idea I played football in high school, played football in college, graduated with a degree that had nothing to do with anything. And so I’m graduated, and criminal justice major, and I don’t even know where to go what to do. And a bunch of my former players, former friends said, Hey, you can go out to Europe and still play football. And I’m like, Well, I got nothing going on. So next thing I know, I’m, I’ve connected with a team in Munich, Germany, and I am their sole American. And it’s really interesting American football at the time in the 90s was nobody played football, but a lot of these guys wanted to have their startup teams. And so America, if you can, if you could afford an American, it was like, we were at a different level. So my team didn’t have a lot of money, they could afford one. So that means I had to play offense and play defense. And I was the assistant coach, and I’m at 24 years old, or whatever. And it was just embedded on the only American. Many of the guys spoke English. But but but quite a few didn’t. And so we had this language issue. And then after the second game, the head coach quits, he leaves literally at the end of the game, all these guys look at me and say, Ryan, you want to coach and I’m like, Oh, okay. We have some language issues. And I’ve never done this before, but you’re paying me. So what the heck. So now I’m the head coach. And that kind of changed my life. That was the now I want to be a coach, I went back to United States and wanted to be a coach. That’s when I got sent to the high schools and everything else I shared after that. But while I’m coaching, this interesting thing happened, which was that all of our plays were numbers. So like, we would have an even number 16 would be a run to the right, and the opposite would be a 1760s and 70s. But then we also had a passing structures that we had a numbers above 50. So I had 60s and 70s. So if we wanted to run a 60 would be a pass, but a 16 would be a run. And the guy was the way that the plays would work is I was playing but I would sit I would just after the play, I would tell the quarterback and then he would turn around and tell us but he he had, they all wanted to do the numbers in English. And he had his accent was so hard for the for everybody. Even the Germans couldn’t understand. And so he was saying 16 And we’re in the huddle goes, did he say 16? Or 16? I don’t know what I actually get over get penalties because nobody knows what the play is. So I had to learn the numbering system. So we went English numbers were zero to German was zero to 50. And then English was 50. And above and oh, hey, that’s all the thing. And I just had to learn, learn how to do some number and in German. And it was just sort of a real neat experience and such. And so to this day, my time in Germany kind of was the, you know, the catalyst of what’s put me here.

Brent Warner 8:32
So you can you can you can count to 50 then right,

Ryan O’Donnell 8:34
I invite that I feel sexy. Exactly. Yeah.

Brent Warner 8:39
You got it, you got it. That 16 and 60 thing though, is if you talk to ESL teachers, that’s like everybody knows that. Yeah, we we teach that lesson over and over again, about stretching out the sounds and how to make sure that no sound is in there. So it’s a it’s a very, it’s, it’s a common issue for many of us as we jump in here. Interesting. Okay. All right. So I’m Ryan, we’re going to we’re going to start looking at some of these games, some of the things that you’re actually building here and so Ixchell do you want to start off with any of these so Ryan gave us a some links to several of the games we’ll take a look at some of them. And Ryan, you’ll you’ll kind of explain what’s going on with them but Ixchell, I’ll have you start off and choose what you want to look at.

Ixchell Reyes 9:25
Yep. So the first one I opened and I don’t know if these are an order that you sent them but the first one of the ones I like that, that I didn’t recognize any of the graphics was frazzle.

Ryan O’Donnell 9:36
Love it okay. Yeah. So that the quick story on frazzle is this are all of my games is this. I think so many of us have know that the grandfather of games is Jeopardy. And we have we many people have played Jeopardy. You saw Jeopardy and we’ve been doing it before the tech days when teachers would do a chalkboard or they do little index cards that you would say hey, I want vocab for 200 and then you take the index card off the board and you’re ready Read it. And so, so many of us still do that. But in essence, I have Jeopardy games available, those kinds of things. But in essence, it’s still just a q&a. And I like the idea of changing it up a little bit from I just don’t want to ask questions and have kids did they know or not know the answer? Because that’s not really it’s somewhat fun Nish, but it’s not the most engaging thing. And so, I have many of these other games that have other levels of them. frazzle, the game that you mentioned, is my, um, it’s the opposite of jeopardy. It is also based on a television show, and I have this version two, I got two versions, I got my own, I made this thing called frazzle, but it’s based on the show has been around forever called $100,000. Pyramid. And why it’s the opposite is if Jeopardy is you give the question as the teacher and the kids give the answer. pyramid or frazzles, the opposite you just have a prompt on the board. Now your students are the ones who have to prompt the other student who is not able to see it to guess the to guess that. In essence, it’s the game if you go to any amusement park and you’re standing in line, somebody’s playing the game on their phone heads up. And that’s Yeah, yeah, and it’s an it’s an unbelievably fun game. So at the high school level, you know, when I’m teaching my classes, I’ll have three of the same three or four of the same classes in a day. So I get a play frazzle, let’s say four times with four different groups of kids. And even within there have multiple rounds. And they’re all so different and organic, because I have no idea what the kid is going to say, to be able to get the other person to, to get to the prompt, it’s towards photosynthesis, good luck, you got 30 seconds to get the other person to say photosynthesis. And this is almost all of what I have these types of games, many people say you do games and although we call them games, they’re really these are these are review experiences or game show Game Show reviews. That is really based on we’ve covered some content one way or another. However, you’ve taught that they’ve read it, they’ve watched it, they’ve listened to you, they’ve done whatever. And I don’t want to be able to see as we go into some sort of an assessment, ie test or whatever you want to call it, like, let’s see what we know about this thing. So what we’ve learned, and it’s a really awesome experience to sit back and, and I do frazzle and I just sit there with my clicker. And the kid gets photosynthesis, and I just click to the next one. So I’m relatively uninvolved, just watching these kids go through and trying to be able to get the others to be able to say that, and there’s rules you can add or not add, I have a timer built into it. And the timer simply is just a YouTube video that lasts 20 seconds. Oftentimes, though, by the way, if you don’t want to I like I just taught summer school this last summer, and I wanted to be able to the kids struggled a little bit more. So I’m like, I’m just gonna get rid of the timer, just a YouTube video deleted. And I’m just going to be the guide realized sooner or later when the kids are done, they move on. And so yeah, I basically do like, Hey, you got it for one round, you got seven terms to get that can be people, places, events, vocabulary, even images, I’ve used to do this. I mean, like, I’ve been doing this for so long, both of my kids are in college, we would do this at their birthday parties, we would do it before they could read, we would just put up one time we did like Disney or Pixar movies. And we just put the poster behind. And it’s interesting seeing like a four or five year old trying to explain, you know, Toy Story, oh, this is the movie where you have and it’s great because that they’re communicating and trying to get in using those skills and their verbal skills and how to try to be able to give clues but not, but not say the part of it. And it’s, it’s it is to this day, it’s it hits all the the wins. For me, it’s the easiest game to set up, you just type in words, it is so the most fun. It’s the one that evolves the most based on the class. And it’s also the one that I have done the most and will continue to do the most

Ixchell Reyes 13:50
in our ins. So I’m looking at it and it’s reminding me of sometimes when I’m having to review words with students, there may be I don’t have time, I don’t have time to create the flashcards or to create something. And I like that. I think for me that you have the built in timer. Yes, I have a little physical timers. Yes, I can do it on a cell phone. But the fact that it’s there makes seems like it’s one fewer step that I have to worry about. And the students can run it themselves. Like we have a huge smartboard but now I’m thinking this morning I had to review I was subbing in a class I’d never thought taught before and it was. So I teach English for specific purposes. And it was basic electricity. And I knew I knew the terms that they had there was a particular jargon, and I had to review with them. And if I had had this ready to go instead of asking them Okay, let’s just one at a time explain. It would have made my job as a sub. Oh, yeah, more enjoyable, and more than just go back in

Brent Warner 14:52
time. Yeah. Well, I also liked that too, because you I mean, it’s super simple. When you have this template here. You could also Give it to a student right and so you put in the words, and then they could even be the one running it for the class or for the other students who are doing it so, so there, you could really get quite hands off. Once you just have the simple, straightforward template here I love there’s lots of opportunities there. So

Ryan O’Donnell 15:15
oftentimes, many teachers will have the, you’ll have a study guide for the unit, you’re doing, hey, we’re doing eighth grade science, and we’re doing molecular biology or something like that anyway, and there’s a little hay on the study guide, it’s the things that we’re going to ask you this the terms of the people, the places and so a great idea to be able to give it to the kids have them decide which ones that they’re ultimately going to be able to put in there and such and so it is straight, grab the study guide, put them in also I show all the time to you don’t have a study guide, go to Quizlet Quizlet is where I go all the time to be able to get teacher flashcards in their in their search for whatever topic that you’re doing. You like oh, it’s all right there for you. Quizlet even allows you to to be able to search when you say let’s say I wanted to do eighth grade, eighth grade US history. I can type eighth grade US history in that say just give me Quizlet created by teachers. So not the student wants it like Oh, so now I got some of these great examples of these other units of study that I can straight pull from.

Brent Warner 16:12
That’s awesome. Yeah. Okay, so we’re gonna jump over to the game that I have seen. Oh,

Ixchell Reyes 16:19
you know what, I love that. I know. I didn’t know you said there’s a game called the $1,000 pyramid. Yeah. $100,000 payment. Yeah, well, I’ve never heard of it, but just changing the name on something or giving that name to that to an activity. The students, like for example, I can already see all my students gonna say let’s frazzle what this frazzle mean by the way frazzle and so it would for English learners, that’s, that’s a great way to engage them and not having sometimes they get tired of the coats. So it’s like

Ryan O’Donnell 16:48
you said, the neat part about my frazil game that I made. I had the cool little like, it’s got an emoji icon and I wrote frazzle. That’s, that’s not a graphic. That’s just text. So feel free to rename it whatever you want it to be. You could change whatever, you know, it’s just a text box. So

Ixchell Reyes 17:04
yeah, for ESL for students like,

Brent Warner 17:08
Yeah, well, yeah, none of my students would know what frazzle is by themselves.

Ixchell Reyes 17:13
But then they use it after this. Yeah. And

Ryan O’Donnell 17:15
that’s what’s kind of neat, too. It’s so wild that I’ll be in my class or schools, but 2000 kids here, and we’ll be playing, you know, I’ll say, Hey, everybody, we got a game to play and I’ll hear kids that will say, Oh, we’re gonna play frazzle, a kid I’ve never had before. And I’m like, Oh, you played for us before? Like, oh, yeah, we play frazzled and miss so and so’s in class. And I’m like, we have so many teachers who are now doing it. I’m like, Oh, that’s really cool.

Ixchell Reyes 17:38
And it’s cool when they ask other teachers, hey, do you have that game? That is such a such teacher place, and it’ll be nice.

Ryan O’Donnell 17:44
If they do. Show you mentioned Kahoot. I have nothing against the people that Kahoot I think it’s awesome. But I do feel like we have all play a lot of codes.

Ixchell Reyes 17:54
We are coded out I’ve

Ryan O’Donnell 17:57
nothing negative against them. They’ve just done a wonderful job of doing the same thing over and over again. Yeah. Saturate saturated. The quiz show market, right? Yes. Because what they did is they made it straight up easy. Yes, super easy to be able to do them in the student interactivity. Kahoot just nailed and did a wonderful job at.

Brent Warner 18:16
So this was the next one that I was looking at, which is I’ve seen so many teachers go I wish I could bring this into my classroom, but I don’t know how what the cards or whatever else it is. So apples to apples. I am really interested to see how you set this up. Right? And because now it’s on the it’s on the drive there. It’s accessible for everyone. How do how do we bring apples to apples into a little bit larger classroom?

Ryan O’Donnell 18:41
Gotcha. So So although I call myself the game show guy, I’m trying to do game show slash board games. So the apples to apples, and I just shared you guys another link if you want to check in the in the chat. So I have an apples to apples, hey, this is what you put up on the screen kind of a thing. But it’s not really a screen game. This is more of a board game and you’d like to Apples to Apples is a wonderful game about that argument about hey, I’m going to be able to say, bring up a topic and then can you be able to you know if you’ve seen the rules for it, you know? So like I say something that is I can’t think of any offhand for like a vocabulary, something that is exciting. And then you put then you have all these other things. Oh, I think movies are exciting, or I think my mother in law’s exciting or I think and now you have to go you got 30 seconds and say why is your mother lawn exciting? Or why are movies exciting? Or why is your pet goldfish exciting. And so it’s a great opportunity for me to Okay, I got to be able to put together my debate if you would, and I need to be able to present my points and ultimately have a judge vote on who gave up the best example of an exemplar model of that. Have you guys played apples to apples and get the follow this?

Brent Warner 19:58
Yeah,

Ixchell Reyes 19:59
yes, that’s it. I’m curious now that you showed the template. So on the screen, on our end, we see a template and I’m thinking, ooh, this would make it so much more fun for basic electricity, vocabulary and adjectives and then throw in a few random ones, non electricity ones.

Ryan O’Donnell 20:15
So I have the one that you could put up on the screen that the class can follow. But there’s another one that I made that I changed the Google Slides and I have in both PowerPoint or Google Slides, I changed the dimensions from a 16 by nine ratio, basically the size of your projectors or TV screen, your classroom, and I changed it to an eight and a half by 11. So it’s a printout. And so this one straight up is I just recreated the apples to apples card, and rotated the textboxes. So you make your own. So I have, you can go, like there’s one green, and then there’s the than the red cards that go with it. So if I wanted to do something, let’s say if I’m teaching a US history class, and I wanted to do dangerous would be the word and then I would say okay, for US history, what is dangerous, I could put nuclear weapons. I could put Richard Nixon, I could put Woodstock, things like that. And then the kids like, all right, why is Richard Nixon dangerous? Okay, Richard Nixon was dangerous, because of that kind of thing. And then you can add some fun ones in there, too. They’re all designed to be eight and a half by 11. So you type them in there. And I even put the backs on there, too. So this is straight, like I said, just go print, hope you have access to a color printer, if you don’t have a big deal, then you take them out, do you have a laminator at the school and you put them you know, the card on the back and the and the can’t talk on the other side of the front, you run through laminator and you get your own built in you make your own little apples, apples cards with whatever your content you want. I love

Brent Warner 21:42
that. I’m glad you started off with that example, just a new you’re searching for a word and you found exciting, but like that actually is a common issue for our language learners is the ing versus the IDI forms of words. So saying, Hey, this is exciting. I am excited. I am exciting, right? And so. So you can also see how you could start tying in language points here and saying, Hey, if you guys are going to be using this, if you’re gonna say, you know, my, my mother in law’s exciting versus my mother in law, I’m excited, right. And so you start having these conversations where they’re getting into groups with each other, and they’re trying to make these arguments, but they need to make sure that they know what the subject is, and what that means when they’re using the correct the ing form. Because it goes bored, boring, you know, interested interested in this thing. All of these ones. And so these are common,

Ixchell Reyes 22:32
have been read is eventually well, you know, after they are you somebody who doesn’t know that their friends is gonna say no, that one cannot be exciting. And then they’ll engage in that authentic peer to peer interaction.

Brent Warner 22:45
That’s right, yeah, that’s where I’m seeing it is going, okay. Because once you start getting them actually talking about what those words mean, and then understanding what’s going on inside of there, when they’re, they’re playing the game, they’re not really thinking about the fact that they’re, you know, actually experiencing the language and making sense of it and kind of solidifying it in their heads as well.

Ryan O’Donnell 23:05
These are talking to you guys, this is great to be able to hear other perspectives of how of how this how these things can be used. So this is wonderful,

Ixchell Reyes 23:14
right? And you said earlier, like, you know, the, you have the templates here, and you said, name it whatever you want, and make up the you have rules that you make, right, and that you won’t change. And so I’m thinking sometimes, as teachers as language, teacher, language teachers, we get stuck with the regular rules. And then we limit ourselves. And I think one of the things I’ve learned through playing games with my language learners, is, I don’t have to follow those rules. We have to have a time limit that often because, you know, they want to argue and they want to talk and we want them to talk but we also want it to be useful talk time. Well, let’s let’s talk about it together for language learners, being able to negotiate all of those and agree upon rules that we follow. I think it’s great. I think that’s the doesn’t limit you.

Ryan O’Donnell 24:02
Okay, awesome. A lot of great ideas.

Brent Warner 24:06
All right, Ixchell which which one do you want to grab next?

Ixchell Reyes 24:09
I don’t know Let’s Make a Deal.

Brent Warner 24:13
I mean, here’s here’s the age gap right here is like Ixchell doesn’t know all of the like, these like classic games,

There’s a cultural gap too

Oh yeah – the cultural gap.

Ixchell Reyes 24:23
Because I’m from Mexico, so seeing that piece so for me, it’s like, oh, that looks cool. It looks like a legit game show.

Brent Warner 24:30
Sorry. My mistake. You’re old! but we’re in from different cultures! (laughter)

Ryan O’Donnell 24:36
Interesting seeing the I mean, I’m a man on the other side of 50 and it feels like the game shows are not what they once were.

Brent Warner 24:45
No, no, you know, you have to tie them up with zip ties and slam them against the walls. That’s how game shows work these days.

Ryan O’Donnell 24:51
Yeah. Like the idea of what I grew up in in Southern California I grew up on we got one television in the house. And there was family game night that you can play at home and you can watch on television. And I had two brothers and my mother did after school daycare, and I remember even trying to be pretend to be sick so I could stay home and watch prices, right? Yeah. I Barker at 10 o’clock on CBS. And it still is I’m 50 Almost 52 And it’s not Bob Barker, who just passed away. But it’s still 10 o’clock on CBS. And it’s just but it doesn’t have that resonance that it wants Did you know and the show still exists I mean, basically all the games that I have out that I have are still are still being produced new ones are being produced all the time on Let’s Make a Deal pyramid Jeopardy, all that kind of stuff.

Brent Warner 25:41
All right, so let’s talk about let’s make a deal right? And what what how does this game work?

Ryan O’Donnell 25:45
Let’s make a deal. This is it’s this one’s your rooms gonna be hectic, the experience is hectic. And it’s basically this. You ask people a question, Hey, can I get break the class up into three teams? All right. Can you play somebody from playing? Team One, Team Two, Team Three, come on up. Here’s a question for you. You throw up the question. Hey, what’s it called when plants turn the sunlight into energy ready? And then he gets a whiteboard? Show me your answers. Photo, they all got photosynthesis, correct. Nice job. And you give them money. And you could either give them money, you know, paper money, not playing money, I was thinking you could just write it on a board. That’s boring. I like to didn’t bring it with you guys post this as an audio podcast. So nobody could see I’ll pretend I’ll have it here. You can get real fake money from Amazon. And I will say hey, congratulations, you all want. So here’s $10 $10 for player 110 for 210 Three, now they have it. This game, the winner, the winning team is going to get prizes. So hey, I always have look at a mobile phone. Bang, there’s Halloween candy for you, winning team, you’re all getting candy. Who wins? Whoever has the most money at the end? That’s it. We’re not playing to a certain number of questions. We’re not playing to whatever, we’re just I have these number of questions. And nobody’s even gonna know how much money you have. Because you’re not keeping it on a whiteboard. Everybody just got $10 for photosynthesis. And then they get then they’re gonna be like, okay, it before they start to think about walking back to their group, I say, Hey, hold on a second. And they like, Wait a second. I’m like, Okay, so here’s the part of the game. It’s called, let’s make a deal. You all got 10 bucks. Congratulations, you got that question? Right? Do you want to keep that 10 bucks? Or do you want What do you want? what’s behind curtain number one, or Kooten? Number two, or curtain number three. And what I have done on these curtains, some of them increase? Great. You have to give me that? $10. Give that back to me. You chose curtain number one. And if you open up curtain number one, what do you have on curtain number one? Congratulations. 20. Now give you a $20 bill instead. And somebody’s like I went on that give me this one. I’m gonna take her number two. You got post it notes. Congratulations. There you go. That’s it. I got all these slides. And they’re all different goofy things or whatever. But basically, you want this money or you want I got a box? There’s a real box. And there’s you can shake the box. Do you want it?

Brent Warner 28:07
Yes. No, in the box,

Ryan O’Donnell 28:11
what’s in the box? What’s in the box? It’s now this. This phenomenon, the original host was called Monty Hall. And it’s this whole thing that they talked about the Monty Hall thing that people are just driven by the unknown. Take the box, take the box, and you’re like, Ah, I don’t know. You can see if you scroll through it, I got all these other silly ones. Like, instead of getting $10, I’ll say hey, congratulate you got the question right? Now, you get a roll of die, whatever you roll, I’ll add a zero to that you roll the 110 bucks, you roll it six at $60. But actually, I’ll get you before you roll the dice. Do you want to roll two dice? If you answer the next question, correct. You can roll two dice and double your money. Or if you get the question wrong, the double then you lose your original money. So it’s all these dilemmas, and they’re representing their team, which is also kind of crazy. So I can see how it’s gonna be chaotic. And his team’s job, take the money. No, take the box. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. It’s kind of fun so

Ixchell Reyes 29:05
that I can just so I was planning for my next week’s class. And this time I’m teaching American culture. And one of the one of the pages is just the worksheet on what facts do you already know about the American flag? They’re supposed to answer without they’re all international students. So they have to answer or guests or whatever. I just thought, oh, my gosh, I could turn that into this. And now it’ll, they’ll actually remember what the answers were. Because usually they’re focused on I just want to write them down so we can go to the next activity.

Ryan O’Donnell 29:38
I think that’s some fun ones in here, too. It’s like one of them. Hey, the three players come up. Sometimes they’re not even questions. All right. Everybody write on your whiteboard, what city you were born, whoever was born from the farthest location from where we’re at right now. I’m gonna give you money, and they’ll turn over there. How much money do I give them two bucks for every letter.

Brent Warner 29:59
Oh, That’s good.

Ryan O’Donnell 30:01
Yeah, that works for us. You know, like, it’s a really long job, that kind of stuff and

Brent Warner 30:09
so Ryan remind me is let’s make a deal was that the show that if they got like if it opened up and they got the donkey or whatever that it gave the trumpets the

Ryan O’Donnell 30:20
and the sound effect is on. It’s called the “zonk” is the technical term. And if you get it, I got songs built in, I got paper clips, I got things that most people would have post it notes and use make up your own. You got some of my you got my Tupperware from lunch today, they’ve already finished it congratulate

Ixchell Reyes 30:39
I see I see one slide here that would end friendships. You get to steal $40 from one of the other teams.

Ryan O’Donnell 30:46
Yeah, that’s a good one. Like, I’ll take her number one like, Hey, you get 40 bucks, but you gotta go take it from another team. Another go the other team, the team’s all. Good again, the neat part of this game is nobody knows really who’s winning or who’s not. So when it’s all over, you’re like, Okay, let me see team number three, and then they’re just counting their money, all that kind of stuff. I do recommend that you shouldn’t be the plate, you should be the host. Have somebody else be the be your banker, havoc and the kid can be on the team. But basically, you don’t want to be doing a pause for a second you got $17 in your account. Yeah, that’s smart. Okay. By the way, go to Amazon and look up play money to play money notation straight. It says play money on it. Boy, it looks really good.

Brent Warner 31:27
All right, so we’re gonna jump to a true classic Wheel of Fortune. Oh,

Ryan O’Donnell 31:33
I’ll be honest with you now, as we’re talking Wheel of Fortune is a bit much.

Brent Warner 31:40
What what makes it a bit much?

Ryan O’Donnell 31:42
Ah, first off, all right wheel of fortune is this. This is, hey, this is the time to go get a drink or whatever, if you’re listening to thing and if you’re not, if I really I struggle with technology, maybe we’ll have fortunately for you, but it’s the one that it’s been my white whale that people have asked me for a long time. How do you make a wheel of fortune game? And it’s a complicated process? How can I be able to click on something if I say give me a letter M how many letter M’s are on that board. That’s a complicated amount of coding, but there’s some, there’s some computer stuff that needs to go on there. And I built all that in for you.

Brent Warner 32:18
So I just want to be clear that they should be paying Vanna White, more than she’s for salary. Because it’s not that easy to do technologically. Right?

Ryan O’Donnell 32:26
Y eah, goodpoint. The, it’s so complicated, Google Slides can’t even remotely handle this. So this has to be a PowerPoint only game, okay. And that was able to crack the nugget thanks to the YouTube and all that sort of stuff found other peoples who were able to do that. And it’s all built for you. And so if you’re really excited, and you want to do this, you simply come up with your word, your phrase, you know, whatever that phrase is. And then the game plays where they can spin a virtual wheel, I built a virtual wheel in PowerPoint, that can stop and they say, give me a letter T. And then if you click the letter T, you’ll have to pre do your puzzles. And then you put all the you spell that are in the right place. And when you click on T, all the T’s pop up. So although I’ve done all the programming, you still need to be able to come up with what your phrases are, let’s say if it was going to be like United We Stand or something like that. You have to like do you and I tea, you got to bring the little boxes on there and do all that sort of stuff. Which brings me to the point which that like I think we don’t know if we’ve mentioned the beginning but all of these games. If anybody wants to play with any of them, please, we’ll talk about at the end about how you can access them. But I have a YouTube channel that walks you through all of this I don’t want to do a full on. This is a podcast and a tutorial would be terrible. So I’ve done tutorials where you see my screen and I walk you through the process and such so and also the other caveat and Wheel of Fortune. It’s my newest one. I’ve spent my summer working on this thing. You guys mentioned we’re at the end of summer and so that’s what I did. People said what do you do over the summer? Like I said, that lazy boy and I I turned on Wheel of Fortune reruns and my wife and I are watching that one. I will I built this game.

Brent Warner 34:02
Perfect. Ixchell, I think we’re gonna we’re gonna hit the last one here.

Ixchell Reyes 34:07
I don’t know if I opened the

Brent Warner 34:08
last one. I didn’t get the last one. Well, then we got it. I got it here. This is one Ryan we I think we played it.

Ixchell Reyes 34:17
No still still my fun. I like the way I do know this game. Well, I I know the title.

Brent Warner 34:26
All right, when we made it to win it.

Ryan O’Donnell 34:29
Brent you tell me your story about minute to win it you were gonna mention something where were you gonna mention?

Brent Warner 34:33
Oh, well, I was gonna say that. We pulled this up at cue right? I think we have this version of this up cue for the game game show night and people were going nuts just running around. I have mixed memories of this night as people are going absolutely wild. And so it was hard. Like I mean, we’re talking about like, pure visual stimulation where people there’s just stuff going on all over the place but but I do remember this one coming up and And and I think we had a great time. So that’s my memory is just faded action. Like it’s like a montage of action shots of people running around doing all sorts of crazy stuff. But that… you tell me.

Ryan O’Donnell 35:15
Yeah, so basically minute we’ve done Minute to Win It games, I think everybody has seen them and played them at parties and, you know, real popular for a while that was actually television game show it was I remember that’s how I remember it. Yeah, it had a couple seasons of that as well to how I modified it was this. And again, you’ll see my direction slides on here. Plus, I got the YouTube tutorial on it. I came up with this, which is the I want to play a game, but how can I connect it to some sort of like I mentioned before my Jeopardy review stuff. So basically, I’m gonna have three people, I usually do that same thing. But feel free, I like to do three teams, and then have one person from each team come up that way I usually my classes around 30 or so. And so that means I got three kids coming in. And so most people have an opportunity to play one or two times kind of a thing. So if I have one person come up, and then I give them three questions. Each question I give 10 points. So let’s say if you got them all right, 1020 30 points. Other person got two questions, right, they got 20 points, and the third person got three, right. So it’s 3020 and 30 points, and kind of like let’s make a deal. We’re not done with that. Now we’re gonna play a game where you can do more. So the minute to win a game, basically, I’m gonna say this, if you came in first place in a minute to win the games, you’re going to double what you got on the questions. If you came in second, I’m going to give you 10 points and whoever came in third you not getting any additional points. So basically, it’s a review game, then play submit it to Win It challenges and you can boost up how well you did. And feel free to come up with I have 11 games that you can look at, or scrap them all and make up your own

Ixchell Reyes 36:46
junk in the trunk.

Ryan O’Donnell 36:48
Yes, some of them are super easy to do. And, and you had experience and you know, some of may require some stuff like junk in the drunks font chuck in the trunk is fun. But you got to get like Kleenex and you got to get like a little rope. And then you got ping pong balls. And if you don’t have all that you could just do the let’s do a bottle flip. Like just do the water. It would be fun water bottle first. Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes 37:09
I like that you have all these physical, physical. So I know. I tell Brent all the time. Sometimes my students get tired of being their big adults in little tiny chairs. So go creative ways of getting them up and bringing that energy so that they’re not there in my class for six hours of language instruction. Oh, boy. That’s that’s hard.

Ryan O’Donnell 37:31
Boy. Yeah. But all of these all of these miniature winter games on my youtube tutorial, I actually got my daughter’s to come in. So we filmed them. So if you don’t know, like, what is cool, what does stack attack look like? We did a quick little filming. So you can see all these ones. I like face

Brent Warner 37:46
cookie face cookie is great like that. That’s one of the one that I say to start, I think it’s a great start. Because Because basically, the students will put a cookie on their forehead. And they have to kind of hold it up there. And then when you say they all they’re all standing in a row, and then when you say start, then they all have to figure out a way to slide the cookie down into their mouth somehow, right? And so, so you’re seeing hands without using their hands. And so they’re they’re making all these like weird, awkward torquing motions. And then the other one too, I think it’s in here was the like blowing the m&m across the table to the goal or something like that, too. We had a great video of who was that Frank or someone? Right? Yeah, Frank, there’s some really great, you know, just like, it’s also a good thing to grab action shots of your students. So then you can share those videos, or you could share pictures out with them later, because then that reinforces the good times that they add as well. And so I really love the combination of the game and the activities together at once here. It’s so much fun stuff for everybody.

Ryan O’Donnell 38:46
Again, not to get I’m not going to anti Jeopardy, but if you notice Jeopardy show you mentioned the idea like if I’m just gonna stand and teach kids and be like, Oh, we’re gonna mix it up. Now I’m going to stand and ask you questions while you sit down. Okay, hasn’t really changed. It’s still the same thing. So like, what can we do to be able to mix it up and such so that’s why all these are fun versions of that. I will give one caveat though to all these things, is you are creating a hey, this is a classroom everybody. And then like No, it’s not. We’re gonna win a game show everybody and some people, some kids, it gets a bit too much. Yeah, like, like, who were to and like, oh, boy, like, hey, so I do. It takes a little bit to train them a little bit, have some conversations at the beginning, like we’re playing a game, like what’s appropriate behavior and all that sort of stuff. I’ll say the number to do that with adults to adults are all the worst. I’ll say the number one problem. It’s it’s a kind of a good problem. But the number one problem that you see is that if you do watch a game show on television, this is what you do at home, you yell out the answers. And so that’s fine when you’re at home, or you’re yet your birthday friend’s birthday party or holiday party. But here’s the problem is that it’s some kids up there and he’s struggling. I think it’s George Washington. Got a lot Yeah, you can’t avoid it could ruin things. Sometimes you just gotta go like, Alright, we’re gonna scrap that whole round. Because

Ixchell Reyes 40:06
I give I, I’ve given penalties I have I’ve, we came up with rules. So if you’re distracting the other team, you’re gonna give them a point. If you’re, if you’re yelling at the wrong answer to distract them, you’re gonna give them one.

Ryan O’Donnell 40:20
Oh, I like that. It’s not I mean, take a point. It’s not like you’re giving it to the other team.

Brent Warner 40:25
And I like that. Or like that. You can also just duct tape their mouths and see what happens

Ryan O’Donnell 40:32
You haven’t read California ed code much have you?.

Ixchell Reyes 40:35
Texas! (laughter)

Brent Warner 40:42
All right, well, there is a ton to play with here. Now, we did promise that if people made it through roughly to the end, that will show away, but we’re not at the end yet. So we’re gonna jump over.

Ryan O’Donnell 40:52
We will. But I’ll say this, though. Hey, by the way, I’d like that. I’d like that late night info commercial. And there’s more like, I got more. So if you’re like, oh, my gosh, somebody we talked about, I got Connect for battleship bingo. Tic Tac Toe, Family Feud prices, right? I’m working on a version of sorry right now. And so if you’re interested in any of these, we’ll stick around to the rest of the show.

Brent Warner 41:18
That’s not all. Alright.

Ixchell Reyes 41:24
It is time for our fun finds. And today I have a health. Fine, I don’t know if it’s a health claim. But I’m a runner. So I’m constantly looking for different ways to have my protein take and intake and make sure that it’s clean. That it’s caffeine free, because otherwise I can’t sleep at night and my cousin’s recommended frog fuel protein packets. They’re developed by Navy SEALs.

Brent Warner 41:54
Are they made of frogs? They have this huge

Ixchell Reyes 41:57
burly frog on the cover. And sure, it’s not from a frog, no burly frog. But again, they don’t have caffeine and you can get I think it’s like 15 grams of protein in one little shot. They’re pricey. But if you’re serious, or if you are counting how much protein you’re taking, and you’re looking at what kind of protein I would say it’s worth a try. Feel protein pack

Brent Warner 42:23
your protein heat back. It’s okay. Sounds good. Mine is I am buying a new car here in Japan. And it is going to be it will we’ve already found it. There’s a lot of bureaucracy and just buying a car. And I won’t bore you with all the details. For it, you have to have a parking spot to buy a car. But you can’t buy a car. You can’t buy a car without a parking spot. Oh my gosh. So this is it’s just madness. So like we went to the police. And by the way, the police are involved in this situation, too, right? And this is not just something that you go get a piece of paper we’re done. We actually went down to the police station. And they’re like, Oh, well, you can’t do it yet. Because you have to have all this information about the car that says like, Oh my god. So all of this is to say yes, we do have a parking spot in place that we have to get. So you have to be placeholders on buying the car and buying the parking spot. But Toyota high ace, it is the awesome minivan, and we’re popping in a bed in the back of it. So we’re doing like a mini van life in Japan thing. So I just google image that

Ixchell Reyes 43:32
I did that too. And I was like, Oh, that’s a pretty big van. For Japan.

Brent Warner 43:36
It’s a pretty sweet, like, there’s different sizes of that van. But it’s it’s pretty big. I mean, I’m a big guy. So I need and yeah, it’s gonna be roomy. And then they have these, like these kits that you can put in a bed onto it. So it’s got the front seats, and then it’s got one bucket, row back seat. And then the rest of it is totally empty. And so we’re putting in a bed back there and then storage underneath. And so that’s what we’re going to do driving around the country at a school because I can still work from wherever, stop at like local libraries in different places and actually get my work done. But the Toyota hiac is just an awesome van. And I am really excited to be doing some driving around the country and checking out places that most people don’t go to in Japan because they don’t have wheels. And so that’s my fun find is

Ixchell Reyes 44:23
Fun fact, Brent has been talking about this for like 30 a second round maybe three or four years ago that you were talking about riding around in Japan. Yeah. This in a van. Pretty cool to

Brent Warner 44:35
make it happen. Yeah, it’s so this is where it’s like it’s like there’s like these little things. It’s like it’s gonna cost some money, but like this has been something I’ve been really have been wanting to do for a long time. So it’s just one of

Ryan O’Donnell 44:45
those vehicles that you can’t buy outside Japan. Yes, I’ve seen this before. Yeah, you

Brent Warner 44:50
can’t buy it outside of Japan and like I would love to import it back. But you can’t like California has like all these crazy import rules where you can’t import a car that’s less than 25 years old. OLED and like all these things and so so anyways it is a cool looking van though and then the one that we got is like is black and it’s got like it’s like the these like there’s this culture subculture in Japan called the Young the Yankee subculture which is like these kind of like punk ish kids you know. And so it’s got this like it’s a little bit decked out with like these kind of funky looking accoutrements cooter moss on it. So

Ixchell Reyes 45:26
that weird, weird tourists in Japan or to the van guy?

Brent Warner 45:30
Yeah, I mean, we’ll see where I ended up. But yeah, it’s, it’s looking pretty cool. So. So Toyota Hi, ace, you might you can get it in Mexico, but you cannot get it in the state. So. So that’s my fun find Ryan, what do you got?

Ryan O’Donnell 45:45
We were talking before the show like social media, whatever. And I’ve, I kind of I’m trying to be able to get my all these game show stuff on the social medias. And but, but I’m not really on there. Like we weren’t like once did back in the day or whatever. But and so as I did get on, like trying to get back on Twitter and trying to be able to post some game show stuff. I got on there. And I stumbled upon, maybe not the most appropriate, but for me, I mentioned before, like my age, like, I’m a guy who grew up in the 70s and 80s. And I found this Twitter account. That’s kind of like the only reason I go to Twitter now. Because it’s just, it’s who I am. It’s called Super 70 Sports. And it’s, if you’d like sports are the 1970s and pictures of moms who are holding their babies and letting them hold their Budweiser cans. And what McDonald’s Happy Meals look like back in 1974. And the guy is inappropriate. He says things but it’s just like a Yeah, like this is this is what like the world. It’s kind of hard. I can’t show this to my students. But like it was a different place, guys. Yeah, you didn’t know what the blue. The blue light special was when I was shopping and Kmart with my mom, but you’d run like crazy when the blue light went off. And anyway. So we’ll

Brent Warner 46:56
have a link to that. Super seven new sports. Yeah, there. So this is an after. I mean, it’s not that it’s not that bad. But it’s maybe maybe Yeah, yeah. Maybe at home type of All right, awesome. There we go. All right, you

Ixchell Reyes 47:18
know, you’re pointing at me.

Brent Warner 47:20
I was just waving fingers around for no reason at this point. I’ll take this one. Yeah. All right. So you’ve made it this far. And Ryan, you promised a freebie for somebody. And this is actually your your, you’ve really made it people worth people’s while to stick around to the end here. So what are you offering here? I’ll offer you

Ryan O’Donnell 47:40
whatever you want, actually, you stick around and listen to every clip really excited about it. If you guys tell me, what do you think would be the best way if we just give you a link to all of my games, I’m gonna give you a link to the to the YouTube channel and you go there. And if there’s any of these that you like, just if you shoot me a message either 1000 different ways you can send me an email, you can make a comment on the YouTube channel, you can send me a Twitter direct message you can I would maybe I was going to do Instagram, but how about that, shoot me an email or send me a message on the YouTube thing and just say, Hey, Ryan, I’d love to try it. Let’s make a deal. And then I’ll just share with you I’ll share with you the link where you can go and be able to download the thing

Ixchell Reyes 48:20
you want door number one, door number two.

Ryan O’Donnell 48:23
My only request is this is that if you like it, just just share with a friend. I know it’s a bit of a hot debated thing. But you know, I am trying to be able to have my stuff on Teachers Pay teacher’s it has been for me, it’s been a place where I have spent not spent it was where I could be able to put my stuff that I have spent a lot of a lot of time on. I spent so much time on everything from the sound effects to the graphics. To the gameplay is something I’ve been doing. Literally, I came up with my first Jeopardy game when I student taught in 1997. And I have been doing it nonstop. Basically, it’s what I always keep going back to so

Ixchell Reyes 49:01
quaterly quality slide decks like the whole well rounded, I guess.

Brent Warner 49:06
Yeah, well, and this is why this is actually the place where I do like Teachers Pay Teachers is like the people putting in real effort. And hey, I’ve actually made a lot of time and put a time and effort into this. And so please pay for it. But you’re giving away a freebie. So people reach out. We’ll put a link to ways to get ahold of you in the show. notes@diesel.org slash 90, right, not the number nine, zero, and then grab whichever game you want from Ryan and then if you like um, you know if you’d like maybe you can support the next one.

Ryan O’Donnell 49:39
And share with a friend please pass the word along. Awesome. Awesome.

Brent Warner 49:43
Okay, so we’re gonna wrap up here so For show notes and other episodes you can check us out@diesel.org slash 90. That’s the number nine zero and of course you can listen to us at voiceEd Canada. That’s voiced.ca You can find us kind of at Twitter. I’m playing a little bit more with threads Ixchell but

Ixchell Reyes 50:04
right now I’m using social media I’m mostly we were we moved to are moving our episodes to YouTube oh yeah we know I want to engage maybe more with people on YouTube I feel like my tribe of teachers is sort of their what used to be on Twitter but I kind of feel more connected there right now where I wasn’t before so

Brent Warner 50:29
yeah so so people can find us on YouTube but is it DIESOLpod I think right also we’re the same everywhere same everywhere so @DIESOLpod YouTube you can find me on social medias in general at @BrentGWarner

Ixchell Reyes 50:45
you can find me still on Twitter underscore pixie i x y underscore p i x y

Brent Warner 50:52
and Ryan where can people find you?

Ryan O’Donnell 50:54
Yeah, check me out on the Twitter at @creativeedtech but go to the YouTube channel it’s better

In German thank you is Danke schon so Danke schon for tuning into the DIESOL podcast