TESL 0170 Practicum - Assignment 3: Continued Professional Development Report
Kahoot! Learning Game
During my teaching practicum, I
decided to make use of a learning-game website and app called “Kahoot!”. This
website allows you to create custom interactive quizzes that can be played
through an internet browser or a smartphone. Points are awarded to students
based on which answer they choose and how quickly they do so. How much time is
allotted to each question can be customized when creating the quiz (I like to
give the students 30 seconds). At the end of a Kahoot! Quiz, you are sent a
summary report of the quiz, which gives you information on how each student.
The website is free to use, and the best part is that students do not need to
create an account in order to play. They simply open up Kahoot! (https://kahoot.it/) and input a code that allows
them to join the current session.
For three of my five lessons I
incorporated Kahoot into my class by using it to review vocabulary from
previous lessons. This method of doing vocabulary review was a huge hit with my
students and many of them commented that it was a fun way to go over old material.
The Kahoot! Website is easy to navigate and use, so I had very little trouble
making my quizzes. I simply made an account and was able to make my quizzes
from there. One feature that I really like about Kahoot is the summary report
that it sends you after playing it. This report gave me detailed information on
how each student performed; I could see which questions they answered
incorrectly, and how long it took them to answer each question. The report also
gives information on which words were the trickiest for students and which
words they got correct. All of this information was incredibly helpful as it
aided me in gauging how well each student understood the vocabulary from last
class. The only draw-back I can think of for Kahoot is that you need an
overhead projector to display the question screen as well as access to Wi-Fi.
Lastly, students need to have either a laptop or a smartphone in order to play.
Fortunately, the university had free Wi-Fi, and all my students had smartphones
(no surprise there!) so I did not encounter any problems there.
To conclude my review of Kahoot,
I’d strongly recommend any teacher with access to the internet, a laptop, and
an overhead projector to use this learning resource. While I used it for
vocabulary review, it can easily be tailored to whichever subject you need to
cover. It’s a fun way to get the students to practice material and the summary
report makes evaluating students quite easy! I plan on using this in future
lessons and am confident that it will be well received by any new students I
teach.
Below I have included a link to the
Kahoot website:
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