Playing with Kahoot

Hello everyone!

   Kahoot caught my attention immediately when it was presented by our teacher. In fact, my classmate and I used it in our practicum with our students. Most of their classes were based on using their English books, thus creative activities were almost nonexistent. Therefore, their motivation and interest towards the English language was not the best. Although, their behavior was not horrible the felt bored while doing the activities. When we got the chance to do the classes, we wanted to introduce this technology to students, and to our pleasant surprise the students' response was extremely positive. 

TALKING ABOUT KAHOOT

     Kahoot is a tool based on gaming. You can do different kind of quizzes related to the topic you want student to learn. Since it has gaming aspects, students feel more motivated to work. If you do a quiz, you can create as many questions as you want, with their respective alternatives, adding pictures to help the student choose the right answer. Moreover, you can decide the time that each question will have depending on the level of difficulty. At the same time, you can keep track of the students' results which is helpful to know their strengths and weaknesses. Kahoot also demands to be quick in selecting the right answer in order to gain more points. Therefore, students participate actively in the process of the game. 

     Here below I will leave an activity made with 5th grader students in order to understand how this tool works. This activity was based on recognizing nationalities, flags, and some specific characteristics from three countries. 

     The images shown are projected to students using a data or any other kind of device. In their computers or cell-phones, students see the colors and the specific forms in order to choose the right answer. 

LANGUAGE LEARNING

     This particular tool has been very useful and entertaining to implement with students. They have shown a positive reaction to it and they have asked us to do another one next class. I believe that one of the most important things that Kahoot brings is the fact that you can learn by playing a game. However, one can never miss the purpose of every activity. It is important to know how to manage the game, and stop it in order to explain or help students understand possible mistakes. It is important to give feedback to students and ask them why they selected an alternative. It does not matter if the alternative chosen is correct or incorrect, the idea is that students can explain why he/she has chosen it over the other ones. Although, Kahoot gives the chance to create fun material, it can also help you to make students think critically about their choices. 

LIMITATIONS

     One of the limitations that this tool have is the Internet factor. Although, using it has a lot of advantages when working with kids, it can also lead to lose time when the connection is not so good. You need to take into account several things before working with this application. It is important to not only check the Internet but also the computers as well as if the students have the devices, in the case of cell-phones, to work with it. 

     Working with Kahoot was a great experience. Students really enjoyed it and it help us to introduce useful tools that could help students not only learn English but have fun while doing it. Even when, you need to have certain things in order to work properly with Kahoot, you can always change the activity according to your resources. It is important to never lose our creativity and design a class along with students. It always starts by our example.