Do you Kahoot?

Actual student rating of our activity yesterday

This week we tried Kahoot for the first time in my novice and intermediate classes after hearing about it from #langchat people on Twitter.  It was a big hit!

Kahoot is a quizzing/surveying/polling tool that the teacher creates for a class by entering questions for students to answer. The questions and potential answers are projected for students to see, and then students vote with their smartphone, laptop, or iPad.  Though these functions are available in other formats such as Socrative, Kahoot is my favorite so far.

The pros:

• it is very user friendly, easy for non-tech teachers to try (I’ve already recruited some 🙂 )
• You can share your “quizzes” with other teachers.  The quiz I made for my novice class got played in another teacher’s classes, and now she’s making one for our intermediate classes.
•  it’s free.
• It has a competitive aspect to it. Students get points for correct answers, and they get more points for fast, correct answers.
• After each question, students get feedback on their answers AND are told what ranking they are in points compared to the rest of the class.  The top 5 are shown on the screen on the “leaderboard”.  One struggling student who has been working very, very hard to improve was so excited to see his name up there that he had me take his picture with the leaderboard and his “correct” indicator on his iPad.  By the time my next class came in, they all knew that we were playing Kahoot because his photo had been retweeted so many times!
• There is also a final leaderboard at the end of the game, and those 5 get a trip to the treat bin in my class as an extra bonus.
• I love that it reveals how many people chose each option on the screen after each question.  The instant data allows for reteaching right then, right there, and the students even realize it.  One of our questions came out with a nearly even distribution of answers (6 for a, 6 for b, etc.)  Upon seeing this, they asked me to re-explain the concept before I had even finished re-reading the answer choices.

  In my intermediate class, students have been struggling with the usage of subjunctive v. other tenses/moods.  A few minutes with sample sentences as questions and translations as answers seemed to really help–one student called it a “lightbulb moment”.

• You can easily add photos and even video to the instruction screen and questions.
• The kids ask for it.  As I’ve previously described in this blog, this year has been a challenging one, faced with one particularly vocal group of students who really didn’t want to be there. When I finally find something that connects with them, it’s a keeper.
• At the end of the quiz, you can download a spreadsheet of the students’ answers that also shows how many questions each student answered correctly (coded green) and what their wrong answers were (coded red).

 

The cons/drawbacks:

• The site was laggy on the student end at times.  It is entirely possible, though, that this was due to our wifi network and not due to anything on Kahoot’s end.
• It is multiple choice.  It is helpful for a short check-in, but not for my classes for actual testing.
• The speed aspect is great for competition, but not so for slower processors.

In summary, I have really enjoyed using Kahoot, and plan to do so again.  I am exploring having students write questions and quizzes for each other on it, hoping that they will invest even more of themselves into the process.