Hao do I start with Kahoot?

Why Tools and Technologies?

Being a lifelong gamer, I am fascinated by various interesting games and advanced technologies. 

Being a easily-distracted student, I am well aware of the importance of a class being interesting. 

Being an inexperienced teacher, I am afraid of my classes being  dull and not eye-catching enough to my students. 

Personally, I would be more willing to engage and motivated in the class with games and competitions especially in a e-game way. Therefore, the tools introduced in ICT class seem to be able to spice my class a little bit and create some interactions in the class. Among these tools, I would like to choose first and make fun with. 

Get Started With Kahoot

To be honest, I never heard about Kahoot when I was in China. The first time I got to know this tool was in socialinguisitic course last term. Though I was already a mature adult for many years, the games still aroused my sense of competitiveness. My friends and I were so eager to find out the answers and tried to be the winner of the game. By that time I only got the chance of using Kahoot from students' perspective. Not until the ICT class did I realise to use it as a teacher. 

What is Kahoot?

As I have actually already mentioned above, Kahoot is related to games. It is a game-based interactive platform that creates a fun learning space for students to participate in the class.  Students can take part in the activity and answer questions on Kahoot to get points and see the rank after finishing all the questions. 

What can be found in Kahoot?

There are two main interactions in Kahoot, test and opinion collect, which can support different activities in the classroom.

There are four forms of the test and five ways of collecting opinions. 

For the test function, there should be standard answers to the questions, which can help us assess and evaluate students' mastery of the knowledge in the class. Especially for "type anwser", the standard answer should be sloe and specific, otherwise students may feel unfair when they give another right answer without getting points. 

As for the "collect opinions" part, they can also be used for some open questions so that students may give various ideas and answers. In the meantime, it is also easy to see students' preference and fallibility. 

I found all the functions above very useful and interesting to use though there may be some overlaps between the functions. However 😥, you need to pay for the functions with a star stamp beside. 

How to use Kahoot? 

When I was doing the preparations, I also found that we can add videos, photos in the question and sometimes they can be the hint to the quesitons or make the questions more attractive to students. 

Limitations

Though Kahoot is very popular in school and I like it very much, I have to say that there are some limitations about it. 

First of all, the different paid versions of it. 

I totally understand that the company needs to survive with these incomes. While in my opinion, there are too many different versions among which there are only tiny differences. And the free version can only allow 10 players to join in the activity, which is absolutely smaller than a normal class. Moreover, the forms of the test are also limited as I mentioned above which is too simple if there are many repititions. 

Secondly, students can only type and click to give the answer which may lead to the lack of practice in speaking. And it may take teachers more time to prepare the class.

Lastly, if we want to use this in a class, teachers need to show their page in a big screen and students need to have and use their own device individually. Unforeseen circumstances may easily occur under such circumstance. For example, once the big screen doesn't work, the activity will be difficult to carry out. If one of the students has some problems with the device,  noise and chaos may appear in the class and it will take teacher much time to manage the class. 

Finally,

Anyway, though there are limitations with Kahoot, it is still a good tool that we can use in our teaching. I am sure that students' interest and motivation will be increased with it. And hopefully, the limitations will be improved in the future. 😉

Almost forgot to put the link. 

Do have a try to create a Kahoot and here is mine. Click the link👇 

Happy New Year

It was Chinese New Year days ago, how much do u know about it? Have a try. 😁

And in the end, wish you a very Happy Chinese New Year!