jueves, 12 de mayo de 2016

Kahoot: the new interactive tool in our classes

It is well known that the students nowadays tend to be more interested in new forms of teaching or evaluation instead of the traditional ones. There are also both a growing demand and a well-established reality for the majority of millennial students to be technologically literate and use the new technologies, such as PCs, laptops, tablets, or their proper cell phones on a 24 to 7 basis.
The platform of Kahoot has come to help the teachers create in a very friendly, simple and “catchy” environment, tools for teaching or evaluation, reinforcing the need of the students for “good” competition, fair play as well as staying tuned with their habitual use of electronic devices.  By entering the site https://getkahoot.com the teacher can create an account and use one of the thousands existing Kahoots quizzes or make their own one. The site provides a handy path for the educators to write their questions and subsequently to indicate the right answers. It can also use images which can be present during the display of the questions, helping or being part of the question. Through this series of steps, the teachers can create a questionnaire with a number of close type questions (Multiple choice or True/False) which can be played in either a prefixed or in a random order. There are also several features subject to change like for example the given time for each answer, or the random possible answers.
Time to play! In the class, each student or group of students has their own PC, or tablet, or even their own cell phones (provided with Wi-Fi, or with data by their carrier). The teacher visits getkahoot.com and then by choosing a questionnaire Kahoot gives a PIN number, which is shown on a smartboard or with the help of a projector to the whole class. Then, each student or group inserts the correct PIN at the web site http://kahoot.it and a nickname, using their own devices. Kahoot shows the question and the possible answers, each one combined with a specific color and shape. In real time the students can see the same colors and shapes as possible answers displayed on their screens, so they can choose the one they believe as correct. The faster they respond the more points they get (on condition that they provide the right answers). At the end of each question they can see their ranking at the main screen for the first five places. At the end of the game they can evaluate the quiz as well, so the teachers are able to see if the quiz was successful or not.
Kahoot engages students in a fair play process and in a collaborative disposition towards the rest of the team members giving thus an immense boost up in the educational process, since students that seem less daring inside a traditional class now participate as equal players of an innovative “edutainment system”.
So, let’s kahoot!



Haris Dimitrakopoulos
Biology & Spanish Language Teacher

Experimental General Lyceum of Heraklion




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