Turn the classroom into a live gameshow! Kahoot! offers a gamified way of learning that every teacher should try. Students might get tired or bored on long classes when there is too much information to remember of. That’s when a tool like this app can wake up attention and help students concentrate again. Fun, colorful, easy-to-use, and multiplayer – teachers’ new magic wand.
Kahoot! is a multiplayer game that was made for educational purposes as it provides a playful method of learning. Perfectly designed for classroom situations, it is a great tool for teachers to spice up ordinary classes. A totally free platform that only requires a registration at getkahoot.com and fun can already start. When registering, the user receives a PIN code which is needed when setting up the app on smart devices.
Teachers create a set of questions about a certain topic or they can also decide to pick from the premade ones. The classroom gameshow can start, students only need to download the app and insert the PIN code their teacher shows them – in a few minutes everyone is connected and ready to play. Kahoot! is using a quite appealing and colorful graphics: to each answer option belongs a figure – a triangle with red, a circle with yellow, a square with green, or a rotated square with blue background. Students will see only these figures on their devices, the question and the four answers will appear on a big screen or in a projected way where everyone can see it – which forces them to look up time to time not to loose focus from the class. Kahoot! also measures the time it takes for each student to answer which makes it possible to use it also as a quiz game where the quickest right answer can gain points.
So why it is worth to try? All teachers know that playful ways of learning can work very effectively. Just the joy of the game itself helps students get more engaged with a topic thus they remember and evoke the heard information better. Of course it is not suitable to become the everyday teaching method of schools but it is perfect to implement something more challenging and entertaining time to time – students do need this versatility. It is also rewardable that the app can be adjusted to any level of education – can it be a primary school, a high school, or a university, it depends only on the teachers what kind of questions they create. Moreover, thinking of primary school kids in the first place, Kahoot! doesn’t even require the users to own a smart device as it works online as well – so all they need is internet connection. The nice and distinctive graphics is another plus.
Not only students benefit from using Kahoot! but also the teacher. With the help of the app it is possible to save time on grading plus to gain extra data about the performance of the class. Besides showing who answered what, it also shows the time it took them to answer a certain question. With these data in hand teachers are able to adapt their teaching methods.
And the functions of the application don’t stop here. Quizzes can be played also with other people all around the world and after a point even students can create their own games to play them with friends. As the developers of Kahoot! claim: they join a journey where they become from „Learners to Leaders”. The only thing that would need development is the online platform of the game. According to a research of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the online platform is too time-consuming thus destroys user experience.
Kahoot! is one of those apps that can become so effective in teaching methods that it is able to slowly demolish the idea that modern technology is harmful for children and should be banned in schools. Almost all students own a smartphone already and they will use it on classes anyways – at least now for something beneficial.
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