My experiences with Kahoot!

So, a Spanish teacher across the hall from me encouraged me to try “Kahoot!”. Kahoot! is a online quiz maker that works a lot like pub-style trivia. A teacher makes a quiz. Students log into get a chance to take the quiz. The question goes up on the screen and students try to get it right. Get it right quickly, you get many points. Get it right slowly, you get less points. Get it wrong, you get no points.

So, knowing the typical doldrums that the “last-day-before-a-unit-test” can fall into, I decided to try it as part of my test review. So, here’s how I used it: I posted 9 trig problems around the room. Students paired the students up and sent them around in 90-120 second intervals to solve each one. I encouraged them to show as much work as humanly possible to the point of being excessive. (This is an instruction that often gets ignored.)

This part took about 20 minutes.

Then, I fired up the ol’ projector and sent the students to kahoot.it. The quiz had a pin# they had to enter when they arrived. Then they could choose a nickname. (I’d advise some fairly clear boundaries on the nicknames. Just sayin’.)

Then the questions came up on the screen and they could use their laptops, tablets, phones, or wi-fi enabled tech to answer. After each question, the correct answer is revealed and they got a chance to ask clarifying questions. It is possible to set multiple answers correct. The next question doesn’t appear until the teacher clicks “next”. The standings are updated and displayed after each question, too.

So, what did I think? Well, the students sure enjoyed it. Although, I am curious how much learning got done. I suppose we’ll have the the test to offer some insight into that question. Also, one negative is that if the student device goes to sleep, Kahoot! kicks them out of the quiz. In one larger class (32 students), students were having trouble reconnecting and only about 17 students finished all nine questions. That wasn’t the case in my other class (of 22).

The students get to rate their experience after the quiz is done. Ratings were generally (but not all) positive. Also, the teacher gets an opportunity to download an Excel file that reports out all the data including the answers for each student (whether they finished or not), the breakdown of answers for each question and the student survey results. That is a nice piece.

I would encourage you to chime in if you have experiences with Kahoot! or something like it. I feel like tools like this can be useful, especially in BYOD schools.