Using Kahoot.it, a free, interactive assessment tool, as part of my foreign language instruction

You are about to read about a free technology utilizing cell phones, tablets, and/or laptops, in class, that totally hooked my students.  Most days, several of them would enter the classroom with “Are we going to Kahoot today?”  Kahoot has limitations from a FL pedagogical perspective, but increases motivation and fosters interpretive mode like few things I’ve seen.  It has been worth the tiny amount of extra administration, and is fun to use as a closing activity to reinforce the day’s lesson or check for understanding before a summative.  Read on!

Starting about five years ago, I began noticing that administrator types would take a poll at the end of a talk by asking the audience to vote using phones.  The results of the poll or knowledge check would post as bar graphs on the projector screen and we would see either what we believed or what we remembered, depending on the purpose of the assessment:

 "You can see on the screen behind me that many of you believe  ____ while others of you...."

I poked around the internet a bit to try to include one in my practice, but nothing was “sticky” at that point.

This year, I got the chance to attend a vibrant technology conference in Griffin, GA (http://www.griffinresa.net/,) where I was presenting about using PowerPoint more interactively.  One of the other talks was by a principal who had integrated lots of new technology into his communications with teachers and students, and he demonstrated several of them during his talk.  That’s when we got to see “Kahoot!”.

Kahoot! 

Kahoot! uses suspenseful music, bright, clean, graphics, and a countdown timer to draw students in to taking a multiple choice quiz.  You, the teacher, type the questions ahead of time into their web interface, type in 2 or more possible answers, designate the correct answer with a button, then repeat those steps for the number of questions that you have (my quizzes are all between 5 and 12 questions).  You could also easily copy and paste from a Word document to save time, although I did not.  Here’s what it looks like when the kids play (although this is not my classroom):

http://blog.getkahoot.com/post/47536212854/a-year-9-class-at-ratton-school-in-eastbourne-are

Before we “Kahoot,” a bit about the teaching context

This is a Spanish 3 class in the Atlanta suburbs early in the fall semester.  We are reviewing tenses and vocabulary from Spanish 2, including the re-teaching to the kids of how to narrate a story in the past tenses.  I have included “Pobre Juan,” a song by Maná, in that context a few times in my career because it is topical, as it discusses illegal immigration from a different perspective, and it uses a decent mix of the preterit and imperfect, all while inside a set of vocabulary that coincides with what a lot of students are learning in this phase of their FL careers. 

Okay, back to Kahoot!

The administration is so easy.  Once you’ve created your game and given it a name, it appears in a list and you, the teacher, simply click “Play,” like I’ll demonstrate for the quiz below about“Pobre Juan:”

Moments later, while seated at your classroom pc, you’ll click “Launch” and the students will see a unique number appear on your overhead.  They visit Kahoot.it (notice the suffix is NOT “.com”) on their device (phone, iPad, etc.) and they type in the unique number.  You see their names pop up on the screen similar to this, and then you can begin administering the assessment:

  I’ll talk later about the types of questions I pondered creating, but do notice in this screen shot that the question uses a visual.  That’s a nice feature!

Notice the clock!  This playfully torments the students, urging them on.  You can’t hear the music on this blog, of course, but it’s like the soundtrack of a movie when someone is being pursued through the woods or running through various rooms of a building while trying to escape a guy with a mask and a blade.  It’s tense, and the kids love it.

Once they’ve answered the question by pressing a button on their personal device, a bar graph appears showing the correct answer and the distribution of selected choices.  I’m simulating it here for five students: 

Are you seeing the immediate opportunity this tool provides as a formative assessment?  Since 2/5 of my class chose “fui” (the “fui” answer appears in faded-out colors below the triangled “iba”), I can talk about how this part of the song should be imperfect, since this lyric occurs at the very beginning of the song/story, which often provides context.  Further, I can also point out that “fui” is the “yo” form, and thus not an option for third-person “Juan.”  However you would approach that in your classroom, I can tell you that seeing, in real time, the misconceptions of my students right up on the screen was an amazing benefit to using this technology.

What happens next is a real motivator.  I will typically have about 19 students or pairs (I’ll explain that later in the article) who are playing, but only the top five get placed up on the screen, similar to this:

Many, many of the kids thrive on the competition, and their destinies change as the quiz progresses, as some surge and some fall.  For example, I’ve used this tool to “check” homework, as so many students copy someone else’s work just to get the grade.  However, if late in one of these quizzes I pop in a few questions from last night’s reading, those particular students will fall in these rankings quickly and may think twice about their homework strategy next time.  Those who engaged the homework the night before suddenly can bask in their new limelight.  I’ve seen this happen.

Are you seeing the potential?   When the students have finished, you can export a database of results and see exactly who got what right and wrong:

On occasion, I have recorded these as a sort of “daily” grade, but there are reasons not to do this, in certain cases.

General observations, pluses:

• This tool provokes interest!  The kids will want to play it and they will read and listen while the game is engaged.
• The game is easy to administer and very easy for the kids to enter.  There are no student lists to type in or permissions to create.
• The tool shows you what needs reteaching, to a certain extent.  You can easily identify misconceptions held by the students in a short amount of time.  The issue is that once you have done so, the kids are so hyped to move on to the next question that you really need to reteach the misconceptions at a later time when they aren’t so driven to continue the game.
• You can produce data very easily about what needs more coverage, to show student progress or to follow up later.  You can show the database file to a parent, for example, to celebrate progress by a student or to support your assertions about him or her.
• It is incredibly easy to share your quizzes with other Kahoot members, or everyone, in general.  If I were teaching a workshop about this, for example, during the lab portion we would delegate various parts of the curriculum across the room and then share final products with each other.  In today’s high-student ratio environment, efficiency is critical, and this product lets you delegate, create, and share final products without a bunch of administration.

General observations, minuses:

• .         Technologically, the game does not interface perfectly with every phone every time.  Some phones lag or get kicked off the session, and of course, not every student will have a cell phone every day (or ever, in some schools) nor will you have tablets or laptops to loan them.  For this reason, I let students choose partners at times (or I might choose for them), so that two students can work on one functioning phone.  This hurts your ability to distinguish who knows what, so that is why I use this principally as a formative tool.  If you can have a relaxed policy about students working together for a grade, then you can record a grade here and there using this tool without issue.
• .         If you are trying to isolate who knows what, this tool has a high-energy social component that makes it fun to use but difficult to utilize for measurement.  The students can see what each other are doing on their glowing screens and they talk about what to click on while the assessment is going on.  As such, it should be used with humility on our parts, because a student can indeed sneak a few correct answers in without really knowing the material.
• .         This tool does not measure proficiency, but rather the ability to take assessments well.  For this reason I would never choose to use it daily or even more than once or twice a week.  Placing multiple choice questions on a screen is not a best practice, no matter how fun it is to answer them.  I’ll say more about this in a subsequent section.

How to do two important things!

To get started, go to Kahoot.it, and click at the bottom of the screen, to “Make your own at getKahoot.com.”  From there, you’ll create a login and begin creating and managing your quizzes.

One thing that tormented me a bit as I was setting up my first quiz was that it was difficult to find all of my saved work once I’d created it, as the interface was unfamiliar to me at first, of course.  The key to this mystery is the all-encompassing “My Kahoots” menu in the upper-left corner.  Click on that, and you can find anything teacher-related that you require.

The reflective practitioner – Things I would do differently next time

My goal in everything I do is to get my kids to want to interact in the Spanish that they have and for them to be able to do so as quickly as possible and with little anxiety.  For this reason, I dislike conjugation drills and fill-in-the-blank exams where the verb is missing and the kids have to write it in the correct form, preferring instead to leave things more open and let the kids show what they know via description or simple problem-solving (see my article in an earlier blog about “Performance-based Assessment.”)  I also believe in tons and tons of input, with repeated opportunities for quick response from them, aimed at the level of their proficiency.  Usually their proficiency means no more than a few words in a row.

That said, I still use drills and I still employ cloze activities on occasion.  It’s a question of balance.  Kahoot.it can be part of that balance, but I see a few tweaks that would keep it more cutting-edge than the straightforward “Here’s some text with a piece missing” and then “Here are some possible answers to fill in that piece” as you saw in my second example.  Here are three suggestions if you want to try them:

•       Play a piece of realia, as in a CD or video, in small pieces, and place your questions on Kahoot.  The kids will really have to listen to the language to be able to sniff out the quality of the answers you place on the screen.
•       Pass out a reading some time before the Kahoot games begins and have the students demonstrate their processing of it via Kahoot.  They’ll have to read your questions, look at (if you want it to be in front of them) or reflect upon the reading, and then choose the answer. 
•       Place a picture on the screen that requires or reinforces knowledge about the target culture.  Examples might include a metro map of Mexico City, 4-5 photos in an array of places to go in downtown Madrid, a restaurant menu, etc.  Your questions will require that they digest what they see and make a calculation about what to do next.  Examples might include (written in the TL) “You are at the ‘Chabanco’ metro stop.  How will you arrive at ‘Las Bellas Artes?’” or perhaps, “You have about 10 dollars, US, on your debit card.  You want to order a drink and dessert at this restaurant in Puebla.  Using this menu, which two items could you order?”  You get the idea.

These sorts of questions take time to prepare, so please know that I am not suggesting that every question be written this way.  2-3 per quiz would be my goal.  The benefits are great, in that you have created a true Interpretive-mode class of question(s) as well as have climbed up a couple of rungs on Bloom’s taxonomy.  And don’t forget to share with your colleagues and divide up the work!

January, 2015 addendum:

Kahoot! has received user feedback and made changes to the product, notably helping to cut down on the ability for students to peek across "the aisle" and sneak answers from classmates.  See the changes here:  http://blog.getkahoot.com/post/108167281287/new-on-kahoot-google-drive-export-cheating

Greg Sanchez is a foreign language teacher consultant in Atlanta, GA, offering workshops on technology, backward design, music and reading in the foreign language classroom, and performance-based assessment.  He just finished a 12-week stint as a supply teacher in Cobb County, GA, trying several techniques like this one.  He'll continue working on more articles in the coming weeks about that experience.

You can find Greg many ways:

GregSanchezConsulting.com
TeachersPayTeachers.com/store/PicantePractices
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Greg@GregSanchezConsulting.com