Kahoot! - Cool Tool or Strange Sound from an Owl?

 It’s time for another Cool Tool review. This week I’m going to give my opinion of the Kahoot! app and hopefully give some insightful thoughts on how it can be used effectively in a classroom setting. (Wherever you see the Kahoot! or K! logos, I got them from the Kahoot! website. They make these available for download for anybody that wants to use them in an article.)

Let’s get started!

WHAT IS Kahoot! ?

In a nutshell, Kahoot! is an application that allows teachers to create formative assessments and present them to the class in a game show format. Those are my words. Of course, the company that developed and distributes the app has fancier words. They call it “a free game-based learning platform for teachers of awesome, classroom superheroes and all learners.” I guess that’s the difference between an engineering background like mine and the marketing background of whoever wrote that copy. 

PLEASE START WITH THE BASICS

 HOW DO I GET IT? HOW MUCH DOES IT COST? ARE THERE ACCOUNTS?

 DOES IT HURT?

First things first, Kahoot! is a FREE service for education. (They have a paid version for business). It's a web app, so you don’t need to download anything to create or play the games. They do have mobile apps on the Apple Store and Google Play, but for this review I’m going to stick to just the browser-based system. To get started, navigate to Kahoot!.com.

From there, you will need to create an account. I made mine about 8 months ago and I get just a few emails from them. From my experience, it’s not like they are going to bombard you with junk mail. That’s important to me.

There is not need for kids to create accounts or enter personal information to participate in the games. They do have an option for student accounts, but my view is “Run Away! Run Away!” on the kid account thing. I’ll explain later how the kids access the games without an account.

Once you make your account, you’re ready to get started.

TELL ME ABOUT THE MULTIPLE-CHOICE TYPE GAME!

Glad you asked. To make a multiple-choice assessment/game, after you log in you simply click the icon to make a new game. You first have to decide on a name and description for the Kahoot! and also whether the game will be public (openly shared among all Kahoot! users) or private. Language and intended audience are also required. The app also gives an opportunity to credit resources you used, add a cover graphic or even link to an introductory video.

            

Once you get that done, you’re ready to start adding questions. That really isn’t much harder. You compose the question and create possible answers – at least 2 but not more than 4. You chose the time limit the kiddos have to answer and whether to award points (gotta have points if it’s a game, right?) You can also add images, videos and credits here.

           

You can make up to 20 questions, then it’s time for the fun. When you’re read to play with the kids, you go to your list of Kahoot!’s and hit play on the one you want. I happen to find congruent angles, triangles and parallelograms fun for all ages.

Once you hit play, the system generates a PIN for the game. Here’s where it gets a bit clunky. The kids use a digital device – either their phones or a computing device – and navigate to kahoot.it. There they enter the PIN for your game.

The kids next select a nickname (you have veto power, because no kid would every pick something inappropriate) and wait for everybody else to join.

Image used from Kahoot! website.

Now that everybody is connected, you will need to project the questions and associated resources for the class. The kids see only icons aligning with the choices on their device, like it shows in the picture above. Then the game begins. It moves from question to question based on the times you configured. Between questions, the app displays a leaderboard on the projected screen. It has the feel of the streaming trivia games like Buzztime that you see in bars.

At the end of the game, the app summarizes the data into a downloadable spreadsheet. You’ll get an overview of how many people played and how many they got correct along with a summary of a post-game review (How well did you like this game? Did you learn anything?). The summary also has a breakdown by player and by question, so you can review kids’ mastery and your questions and lesson presentation.

Kahoot! makes tips and tutorials available under Resources on their site. I'd recommend taking a look at their professionally produced stuff to get an idea of how the graphics look. They also have a blog you might want to follow or look in on every once in a while.

WHAT ELSE IS AVAILABLE?

In the game format, you can also select an option where the kids need to put the answers in order instead of selecting the best. This can help with assessing how kids are learning processes. You can also make surveys or even have one questions where the kids respond in an open format. This could work well for Bell Work, you could have the PIN posted somewhere and have the kids just get started when they come in.

I LIKE WHAT I SEE, BUT IT SEEMS LIKE A LOT OF WORK TO MAKE A GAME

As with any good lesson plan or assessment, you will have a bit of an investment in making it useful. You will still need to take the time to plan out and effectively create the questions, as well as to appropriately select distractors to correspond with the keyed answer. The time formatting the game will be a bit more than if you were to word process the assessment, but I don’t think prohibitively so. Since the tool scores and summarizes the assessment, you get some of that time back at the end.

Additionally, there are a huge number of games shared on the site, so chances are you’ll be able to find something already done. When I say a huge number, there were 965,000 games for algebra and 810,000 games in the history category. For a more specific topic, there are over 50,000 games for the parts of speech. You won’t be able to save all the prep time, as you’ll still need to filter and evaluate the choices, but it should be a great help. And if you do make one, be sure to share it to help a colleague.

DO YOU GET PAID BY THE WORD? CAN YOU SUMMARIZE?

I’ll try. Kahoot! is a cool app that helps teachers make formative assessments fun. Some negatives are:

• Performance data is not keyed to names unless kids have and account
• It assumes kids all have a smartphone in their pocket. If not, some will be on mobiles and some will need to be using laptops or desktops. I worry about this process being a very visible way to highlight differences in financial or philosophical difference between families.
• The speed of the questions may be uncomfortable for some kids.
• It's hard to get in depth questions - the format is best for fact recall and other simple things.

There are a ton of positives:

• It is fun. Even for older kids.
• It is easy.
• It looks good and provides a lot of data.
• Once you make a Kahoot!, you can reuse it many times.
• There are a ton of Kahoot!’s to use that others have made and shared.

Don't just take my word for it, check out what commonsense.org or The New York Times say about it.

Try it. It may be a way to mix things up a bit in your classes.