Blog Post #2

Kahoot is a simple yet effective tool to use in the classroom to help students learn or assess. I believe most people know how this works, but some don't give it too much thought. I thought it was just for children until I saw my professor use it in my Shakespeare class during my bachelor's. No matter how old or young you are, I believe all students and teachers can find some likelihood to use it in the classroom for its fun and effective use to teach. 

The use of Kahoot is stated on their website: 

Kahoot! is a cloud-based quiz platform that is ideal for students and teachers. Since the game-based platform allows you to create new quizzes from scratch, it's possible to be creative and offer bespoke learning options for students... Millions of teachers and students unleash the magic of learning with Kahoot!. Create your own Kahoot in minutes or choose from 100+ million ready-to-play games. Engage students virtually with our distance learning features, play in class, and dive into game reports to assess learning.

If you were a student that did not like the idea of quizzes or assessments, then I believe that Kahoot will change your assumption of it. 

Ease of use

The reason why people use games like Kahoot is that it’s super easy to master. I have seen teachers who don’t know how to use a computer and they use this game. While there are other teachers that are a master of technology and still use this game. Why is this? Because they rather have something easy to work with because students will also need to understand how it works. And students love to use Kahoot! 

Versatility

No matter what subject you teach, Kahoot can be used in your classroom. If you like multiple-choice questions, you can use multiple choice. If you like true or false questions, then you can use those. If you want to reward students by the number of points to get based on the question, guess what, you can do that too. Kahoot is limitless. You don't even need to have words or symbols, your questions and answers could just be pictures. (The picture on the right is an example of a question template.)

The Overall Likelihood

Here’s why I would use Kahoot more; I did a six-week unit on the book Night (Elie Weisel). For those that do not know about this book, it is an important piece of literature that tells the tragic story of a Holocaust survivor. This is the kind of reading that I took very seriously and I wanted my students to obtain and remember and understand this crowned achievement literature. However, since this book takes place in 1945, and most students can’t connect with a situation like this, teaching the subject can be difficult. So what do you do? Well, I took some advice and I started using some Kahoot! I read the book, and I organized each quiz by each chapter, and every week I had my students compete. Boy, I saw some changes in the curriculum. Students were engaging, they were wanting to compete with their other peers, and most importantly, they were reading more since they were anticipating the taste of competition with Kahoot. Due to my fluctuation of success on this with my students, I’m going to use this more in the future. I think it’s important not to use too much of it though because I don’t want students to think that everything is a game and once they finish that game they can just give off. I will use it as a reward for students that are actually doing the work.