FTT - Kahoot!

https://getkahoot.com/

Gamify Your Classroom with Kahoot!

@joe_edtech

Quite independent of one another, I found two very interesting pieces of research that have changed some of my perspectives on using games in the classroom. One is Dr. Ali Carr-Chellman's work on using games to engage boys in the classroom (I linked to her TED Talk - worth it! I saw her give a version at a conference I attended last Fall). The other is a research study I read on the effectiveness of using student response systems for formative assessment in the classroom (Beatty & Gerace, 2008). I'm still not sure Kahoot! would have caught my eye except that I worked with a Transition to High School Language Arts class last summer in which the teacher used Kahoot! every day to teach grammar to his very challenging students. At the end of the semester, each of the students identified "Playing Grammar Games" as the thing they loved most about summer school. GRAMMAR GAMES!

So what is Kahoot! anyway? If you teach a Freshman Advisory, you've probably seen our Librarians use it to introduce topics for discussion. It is an online student response system with a gaming component. Ever been to a bar and seen different tables playing the interactive trivia game on all the TVs? (Of course I would never enter one of those dens of iniquity, but I've heard about them.) Kahoot! is a lot like that for your classroom. Here's the short demo Kahoot! offers on their website:

Kahoot! is completely device agnostic. You can play it on your phone, on your Chromebook, on a tablet - anything that has Internet access. And, one of the things I like best about Kahoot! is that your students don't need to sign up for an account. They just need to go to kahoot.it and access your game. In order to create games (aka - formative assessments), you simply need to go to getkahoot.com and make a free account for yourself. Once you've done that, Kahoot! offers you step by step instructions for creating and sharing your first Kahoot!, or you can search through public Kahoots! and play one of those with your kids.

Wanna see what happens when Kahoot! is played in the classroom? Click Here.
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Do you help your kids learn with games? Or have you seen better online student response systems? If so, please tell us more in the comment section below.