Kahoot a game-based classroom response system

Kahoot is a student response system. You may remember the old-fashioned clicker or you might be using Socrative. However Kahoot is different to those approaches because it incorporates gamification elements, which makes the learning process fun and engaging.

With this tool you can create game-like quizzes, discussions and surveys to challenge your students learning and make them participating in their learning process. Questions, along with answer choices, are projected in a classroom screen or projection, while students submit responses using a handset device (smartphone, tablet, notebook, etc)

As you can see in the picture bellow the devices display color and symbol choices only; the actual answer must be viewed on the classroom screen, the ones that submit their answer in less time get more points, which makes your to actively participate in the quiz.

One important thing is that playing a game Kahoot! doesn’t involve creating an account for each one of your students. Every Kahoot  that you create or use from the public ones available has a game PIN number, which the learners have to type in their devices and then write their names. Although, if you want to make your own quizzes you need to create a teacher’s account. To do it just follow my video tutorial:

A short summary of what you’ll need to use Kahoot with your students:

• Internet access.
• A screen monitor or projector.
• Devices (smartphones, tablets, notebooks, etc), not necessarily one for each of your students, you can make them work with a partner or in a small group.
• A Kahoot relevant to your class either made by you or others.

Is It good for Language Learning?

As any tool available to be used in the classroom you have to be very critical about it. I recommend you to first test it on your own or with your colleagues, discuss and reflect about it, improve your quizzes and then teach your students how to use it, so you can finally put it on practice.

You can make use of Kahoot to teach grammar, vocabulary or using a CLIL approach to discuss historical events, important celebrations, famous people around the world or the body parts. Everything depends on the topic you are working on in the class. The main idea behind this tool is to create useful and challenging content to support your teaching and promote your learners collaboration in the classroom. In this way they will be engaged and motivated to participate in the game, and you will be able to make them more critical about they learning.

At the end of every activity there is a scoreboard that displays the top 5 results, and your students will be able to provide feedback about the quiz with a star rating, yes/no questions and happy faces. Once they do that, you will be able to collect the entire information as an Excel file or directly on your Google Drive account.

The drawbacks.

There are three main problems that you need to consider when working with technology:

• Disruption: Using internet or any device connected to it can be very useful but disrupting at the same time, controlling a large number of students and any other technological problem can transform your very nice game into a long nightmare.
• Quality of the content: If you decide to use a public Kahoot try to check in the content available is useful but also challenging and of good quality. It will take some time to find a good one.
• Quality of the feedback: Again, depending of the activity or topic you are working with you have to provide a good feedback, it’s not only having fun with the game, but learn, correct the mistakes and improve in the learning process.

Creating a Kahoot quiz.

Create a Kahoot quiz is very simple, just follow the following steps:

1. Choose what you want to create. In this case a quiz.
2. Write a name for your quiz, add questions and their answers.
3. It’s done! Now you can mark some options before launching the game.

Playing

1. Launch the game and wait for your students to join the Kahoot.
2. They have to write the PIN number and their name.
3. Start the game.
4. While playing.
5. Finishing and giving feedback.
6. Collecting the results.

Link to my Kahoot example: https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/29277475-d733-45ad-a85b-a017a1efd0c8

You can see the previous steps in the following gallery:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Advertisement