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Kahoot!
Pros: Oh-so-easy way to make assessment engaging. Ever evolving with new stuff.
Cons: Tracking individual progress is tedious. User-created quizzes can be poor quality or inappropriate.
Bottom Line: This is an effortlessly fun tool, but it shines best with creative implementation that tests its boundaries.
Kahoot! can quickly become a go-to for teachers looking to run quick and lively checks for understanding or exit tickets. Try establishing something like Kahoot! Fridays for quick review. If you don't have time to make quizzes, search millions of public Kahoots to play or remix. Go beyond memorization of facts and allow Kahoot! to introduce scenario questions/prompts with multiple decisions; stimulate conversation from the results. Insert slides between questions to introduce additional information, allowing Kahoot! to become a content-delivery platform. Quiz templates make it really easy to build a thoughtful learning experience that does more than solicit rapid-fire recall. Build a "collection" of quizzes and share the collection with students. The asynchronous features are great for independent review and distance learning.
Don't forget professional development. Use the Team mode to pose pedagogical questions and promote food-for-thought discussions among colleagues and cohorts. Use Kahoot! to break the ice at the beginning of the school year or bond with members of the learning community.
Kahoot!, a student-response tool for all platforms, allows teachers to run game-like quizzes and build presentations with embedded quizzes. Teachers can either create their own quizzes or find, use, and/or remix public quizzes. Kahoots can be presented live or assigned for self-paced learning. During live Kahoots, questions with answer choices get projected onto a classroom screen while students submit responses using an internet-connected device (computer, tablet, or phone). Questions and polls can contain images and video to help further appeal to all learners. For live Kahoots, teachers can choose between Classic mode and Team mode. The Team mode allows groups of students to cooperate with each other and compete against other teams. Assigned Challenges can be completed asynchronously, but students still earn points for their quick responses and compete against their classmates; the leaderboard appears after all participants have responded. Playing a game of Kahoot! doesn't involve student accounts, only a game PIN from the main screen and a gameplay name for each participant.
With a free account, created quizzes can be multiple choice or true and false, and creators can adjust the time limit and point value for each question. Premium accounts add more options, including multi-select options for quizzes.
Full Disclosure: Common Sense Education is a Kahoot! Academy partner; however, our initial rating and review of Kahoot! was completed prior to this partnership. We also maintain our editorial independence, and don't allow this relationship to impact any updates to this rating or review.
With Kahoot!, teachers can integrate slides, videos, polls, and surveys to go beyond the typical multiple-choice quiz experience and move toward a true learning experience. Teachers can also incorporate questions that don't award points to gather opinion data, or include a question with multiple correct answers to challenge students' thinking (and without skewing point totals). Premium features like open-ended responses, puzzles, and brainstorming questions are great for assessing student understanding and prompting discussion. All of this means Kahoot! is now a much more flexible tool than in the past, and is an easy-to-recommend option for quizzing. The Kahoot! Academy and its partner creations do a good job of modeling what's possible through creation; although, the user-generated content is much more uneven (and sometimes even inappropriate). (Editor's Note: Common Sense Education is a Kahoot Academy Partner.)
Data is saved from each round of play and can be viewed online, exported to Google Drive, or downloaded. The reports are well designed for providing immediate feedback, but they're limited because of the way students connect to the platform. For teachers, it would be time-intensive to analyze students' growth patterns or individual problem areas using Kahoot! quizzes.
Learning Rating
One of my favorite tools!
Kahoot is a constructivist approach to pedagogy because it allows students to learn by playing a game. This fast-paced activity increases engagement in students, especially in those who are more competitive. Plus, it keeps the students’ interest for a longer period of time versus a traditional, sometimes more boring review.
As far as SAMR, I believe this tool leans toward the redefinition category, since students have the ability to create their own Kahoots that can be shared to the public. They can also play games created by people from all over. This tool is a great way for students to study and to utilize resources outside of the classroom. I loved playing Kahoot as a student and now I enjoy using it within my own classroom.
One thing I do not like is that Kahoot is not entirely free anymore, but the free options still allow for deep levels of learning.
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