Try to use Kahoot in your teaching!

I got a lucky chance this week to learn about many different tools that teachers can use in class for various purposes. For example, some tools (eg. Quizlet) can be used as a testing assistant while some tools (eg. Voki) may work as a flavor of the class to bring happiness and enjoyment. When I was immersed in the excitement of exploring new things, one of these tools caught my eye, for amazingly I have used it in my real life! This tool is Kahoot, a very useful assistant in class which can not only test the students but also intrigue the students and arouse their interest. 

(Try to click on the website names! You will find something new!)

📑Description of Kahoot

Kahoot is a free platform where teachers can make quizzes in an interesting and engaging way. Teachers can edit questions and answers in a selected question type, which can be multiple-choice questions, true-or-false questions, fill-in-the-blank questions, or sorting questions. After teachers finish creating the course, it will be saved in their accounts. When they want to use it in class, students can join the class through a game pin. Additionally, teachers can use Kahoot to gather opinions by asking students to vote or answer open-ended questions. The platform will automatically generate a word cloud based on the answers from the students. Overall, Kahoot gives teachers so much freedom that they can use this platform to fulfill almost all kinds of educational purposes as they wish.

Question Types

Home Page

💎Evaluation of Kahoot

• Easy to monitor

One feature of Kahoot that differentiates it from other similar quiz-making tools is that teachers have the questions on their own computer screens or on the whiteboards of the classroom, and students only have the choices on their own devices, which forces students to look up and focus on the whiteboards according to teachers' guidance. This brings a benefit for the teachers to monitor whether students are actually participating in the quizzes. It also gives teachers a chance to find out whether students have any doubts about the questions. If puzzled looks appear on the students' faces, the teacher can recognize them and give an explanation for the question immediately. 

The Waiting Page on the Teacher's Whiteboard

The Question on the Teacher's Whiteboard

The Choices on the Students' Screen

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  Music Clips

  Fun with music

When I was a high school student, my English teacher used to play an English song before the class began, and I really enjoyed it. Nobody does not like music, right? Music can either make people feel relaxed or arouse people's enthusiasm and lit up the atmosphere. Kahoot designers really know how music works. There are 14🤯 kinds of music clips for the teachers to choose from.

• Stimulating healthy competition

  

  

  
  

After each question is answered, the correct answer will be displayed and the students' responses are organized and presented as a bar chart, which helps the teachers to see how well students are handling the question. Then a score will be credited to each student according to the accuracy and the answer speed. It makes students see the competition straightforwardly and stimulate them to answer faster and think more carefully. When all the questions are finished, a total score will be used to rank. The top three will be shown while the poorly performing students will be protected. 

Final Ranking

📕 Use in language teaching

I have used Kahoot in my real life when I worked as a trainer for a company that is dedicated to creating English reading materials for language learners of all ages. I was responsible to train the new editors to learn about the rules of writing the materials by providing essential exercises and tests after they read the rules. We used Kahoot as a warm-up activity before the official exams to test whether there existed any knowledge gaps in their minds, through which we could notice the need to explain the rules in detail to help them understand. Moreover, we also used this tool as a fun game to ease the nervous atmosphere before the exams and make the newcomers relax. This is a good example to show the companies how to use Kahoot in the training process🏢before the newcomers actually take up the official job responsibility.

As for the students in schools, I think Kahoot is mainly available for university students🏫, since students in middle schools and high schools in China are forbidden to use telephones or computers in schools. Thus, it is hard for teachers to use any teaching assisting technology to promote learning. However, more possibilities are given to university students. On the one hand, university students have less pressure to chase the best score, and they put more emphasis on experiencing and learning new knowledge. In this way, they will have more passion for this new teaching platform and have more curiosity to explore it with teachers and classmates. On the other hand, language teachers in universities are always seeking different ways they can use to make their classes look more interesting and engaging. Using Kahoot with exciting music and various pictures can attract many students' attention. Students can also learn from playing the games in class.

Here are some brief ideas about how to actually use Kahoot in university classes.

Firstly, teachers can use it to test reading comprehension. This gives teachers explicit data about how well students understand the reading passages. It is so much better than asking the students to finish the reading comprehension questions in their textbooks, and students are forced to participate because teachers can see all the names on the screen to ensure perfect attendance. Secondly, teachers can use it to collect different opinions towards a specific question from the students and gain a word cloud in Kahoot. Teachers don't need to spend extra time organizing the open-ended question answers and can easily draw some conclusions through the platform.

Although I have mentioned some limitations for the middle school teachers of using Kahoot in class🎒, they can also attempt to use it as a long-term opinion collection tool. Teachers can open the designed course for a whole day or even a whole week in order to give students enough time to answer some open-ended questions after school or at weekends. We cannot deny that Kahoot is a useful tool for collecting and organizing different opinions.

💢Limitations

• It cannot meet different students' individual learning needs.

Teachers take charge of the whole process of creating the courses, which includes thinking of the questions and choices and setting up time limits. Students do not take part in the process. This leads to the negative result that all the questions are out of the teacher's own assumptions, which does not take the students' opinions and ideas into consideration. Sometimes what the teachers consider easy for the students may actually be hard for them to understand. When teachers just present their presumed questions in the class,  some problems may be ignored from the students' perspective. Moreover, students have different reading speeds, so setting up a specific time limit for students to read and answer the question may be unfair to some extent unless a longer period is given to meet all the differences.

• The question length is restricted.

Teachers can only edit less than 120 words in the question blanket. It means that if teachers want to test students' reading comprehension, additional reading materials have to be given out individually. The word limit of the question prevents the teachers from giving extra information to further explain the question, so teachers may have to give more details in another form, which takes extra time and effort. 

• It requires the students to have their own electronic devices.

As mentioned above, when teachers are using Kahoot in class, students must use their own laptops or phones to input the game pin to get into the course, for students have to answer the questions on their own devices instead of coming to the podium to answer it on the whiteboard straightaway. This may be a drawback of all the technology teaching tools which encourage full attendance of all the students. However, this can be a burden for students who don't own electronic devices. Many students in middle school cannot bring cell phones to the classroom. Therefore, as I have proposed previously, teachers working in the university may be freer to use Kahoot as a teaching assistant.

All the screenshots in this blog are from my first attempt to use Kahoot to train new English editors.

If you want to know more about Kahoot, Click here or copy the URL: https://kahoot.com/schools/how-it-works/  and paste it into your browser!

I found a video on Youtube for Kahoot beginners to get familiar with it in a short time. Hope you can enjoy it.