Review and Teaching with Kahoot!

Over the summer, I saw several pins on Pinterest of teachers using Kahoot! I finally decided to check it out for myself. The school where I teach is a one-to-one iPad school, so each of my students has either an iPad or a cell phone--if their iPad happens to have a dead battery. I created a free account at getkahoot.com and gave it a whirl.  I found an AP Biology Kahoot on the first unit we study (there are over 14 million Kahoot!s already uploaded and available to use), and asked my daughter and husband to be my guinea pigs.  Even though they didn't know much of the content, they thought it was fun and I decided that I would try it out with my class this year. Students don't need an app or even a sign in. They just go to kahoot.it and enter the game pin that's up on the screen in the classroom.

I can't believe how much my class (12th graders) have loved Kahoot! Until this week, I have only used it for review before a test.  Still, the class has enjoyed it so much that they began persuading other teachers to give it a try. Their English teacher was convinced to try it and told me how much they enjoyed it in her class as well.  Two other teachers have come on board as well. One of my students is very reserved, so I knew she must really love Kahoot! when she saw we were playing that day and danced a little jig in the classroom.

Before midterms, we did one Kahoot! a day to prepare for the exam. One of my students suggested that we replay so they could reinforce what they were reminded of the first time. I tried to do this as much as we had time for. If I had thought about it, I could have shared a link to the Kahoot! with them so they could do it on their own when we ran out of time in class.

While we were doing these reviews, I saw the ability to download the results to my Google Drive. I loved all of the information it gave me and was also helpful because I had offered incentives for student earning certain scores.

This week I decided to try a Blind Kahoot! Instead of being review, I wrote a Kahoot! to help introduce our new topic. I was even able to add an instructional video to one of the questions. They still loved it, but even more so when we got to the end and decided we would play again in ghost mode--where they are playing to beat their first score (their ghost).

They quickly learned that in ghost mode, the order of the answers are changed.  Their was quite an outcry when several students clicked the option location that was correct in the first round once they realized that the options had been scrambled. I loved it since it meant that they had to reread all of the options to make sure they were choosing the answer they really wanted.

Here's the link to the Blind Kahoot! we did this week.