Kahoot: Involve your learner in a Gaming Situation!

One of the tools like Socrative which I had mentioned in my February blog post is Kahoot which a tool to create gaming situation in the language classroom. You can create a variety of games through it such as quiz, jumble activity, discussion activity and a survey. It is very easy to create games, and you also can add videos or pictures in Kahoot. Once you are done with your setting, you can preview to ensure that everything is in correct form. They have developed amazing interface for it as you can insert the game pin on the smart phone icon shown which is seen on the screen. It helps you to try out everything on the single screen so you don’t need to bother doing the things separately on cell phone.

The learners need to have a smart phone/ iPad/ personal computer to take part in it. They get a game pin to get into Kahoot, and as a second step, they are required to type their nick names through which we can recognize them. Now their nick names are projected onto the screen. Once this set up is done, they see four different types of colour which represent the answers of a particular question projected on the front screen. The question and answers are both projected on the main class screen whereas on their personal screen, they see only the colours which they are required to select to answer. It also has lovely music that accompanies an activity while it is being run. However, if you feel that it rather distracts your learners, you can switch it off anytime. You can also set the timing for every question the learners might take to respond. Finally, after having answered of all the questions, the overall result can be downloaded or published in the spreadsheet. So it has a high potential for involving students in a post-activity discussion to make them reflect what went wrong and why.

Kahoot is especially useful to check the learners’ background information and their understanding of the content being delivered having added fun element to the activity. The survey activity can be used to look into their opinion and to involve them in further discussion as why they opine so. It can be equally used to teach grammar and vocabulary designing them either in quiz or jumble activity.

How to create:

Teachers need to sign in to www.create.kahoot.it and click on ‘create kahoot’. It is pretty simple to create once you have your content ready for the activity. It’s good idea to have an outline or plan of the type of activities, such as multiple choice or jumble activity before creating gaming situation in Kahoot.  

Now you might be little excited to create. Here is the video tutorial.

And for students to join the activity, they can either join from the Kahoot app having downloaded it from the play store in their smart phones or can browse directly to www.kahoot.it and get into it entering the game pin that gets projected once you sign in to your Kahoot account and set up the game for play.

Advantages:

Kahoot is a free tool and it’s easy to use.

You can develop variety of games such as, quiz, discussion activity, jumble activity and survey.

You can add video materials and pictures in it.

The music that accompanies it helps to add a gaming element into an activity.

The result is easily publishable or downloadable so we can discuss at the end as anther reflective follow-up activity.

This is helpful to check understanding of some concepts.

Limitations:

Students cannot see the questions and answers on their screen.

It needs a projector to project question in front of the class.

There is no as such option to provide instant feedback like in Socrative. So instant feedback is not possible.

The activities designed in question are hardly used to check higher order skills. It is only limited to check the lower order skill, such as understanding.

I hope you have found this blog post interesting.

You must have been pretty much excited now to try out yourself.

It’s easy, just sign up now and have a go, if you are thinking of using it in your class.