Webwatcher: Kahoot!

Kahoot! is a hugely popular tool, and certainly one I see many teachers using in the classroom. It adds a game-based element to learning by allowing you to create quizzes which award points to the students according to how fast they answer the questions. It is ideal for formative testing, but is often used in warm-up activities at the start of a lesson. The good news is that Kahoot! has been significantly updated, and it now allows you to add videos and pictures into the questions, making the quizzes more engaging.

How does it work?

Kahoot! is free to use. You just create an account and then you can build a quiz. Once the quiz is ready, you can activate it, and this generates a code. The students can use any device to access the quiz, simply by using the web address Kahoot.it, putting in the code you give them, adding their names and waiting for you to start the quiz. The students don’t need to create an account.

I normally get my students to work in pairs or groups of three. This adds a collaborative element to the activity, as well as making it more fun. I project the questions onto a screen at the front of the classroom, and give the students a time limit to answer the questions on their devices. The quicker they answer, the more points they get.

There are various game-based elements. For example, after each question, a league table is updated so the students know who is ‘winning’. A record is also kept of which students are moving up the league. I can control the amount of time the students have to answer the questions – my usual approach is to speed this up as they work through them.

How does the video feature work?

In the past, the Kahoot! multiple-choice quizzes were limited to text-based questions and answers: it wasn’t possible to use images at all. You can now add either images or video into the questions, though the multiple-choice answers can still only be text-based.

The way this feature is set up means that you can choose just a short segment from a video. This is really important, as doing a Kahoot! quiz is normally a fast-paced activity. I tend to use segments of between five and eight seconds. The question and video appear on the screen, along with four possible answers. The students watch the video and then decide together what the correct answer is. It is possible to have a clip from a different video in each question, although I generally prefer to work with just one video, using a different section of it for each question.

This kind of quiz can be used as part of a flipped classroom approach: the students watch the video at home and do an activity related to it for homework. Back in class, they work in pairs and do a Kahoot! quiz that includes the video but checks their understanding in greater detail.

One small problem with the current quiz set-up is that the students are limited to watching the video just once. It can be quite tricky to play it a second time: if you try to do this, it tends to go right back to the start of the video, rather than just replaying the segment you are focusing on.

Of course, you don’t have to include video in your quizzes all the time. I still like using basic text questions, just occasionally including pictures and videos. By doing this, I am adding variety to the types of questions my students have to answer. One tip is to make sure that you start the video segment a few seconds before the part you want focus on and end it a few seconds after it. That way, your students are less likely to miss anything important.

Formative feedback

By creating a quiz at the end of a unit of a coursebook, I can see how well my students have understood the material. Once they have done the quiz, a report is generated, which provides information about which questions they had problems with, showing me the areas where I might need to do additional work. The great thing about creating quizzes which are connected to a book is that you can use them again and again – or at least until you change books.

Team tips

There are two modes you can play the quizzes in: team and individual. Team mode takes a long time to set up, as the students all have to add their names before they start. So, it’s a good idea to put the students into teams, ask them to think of a name for their team and then play the quiz in individual mode. The teams simply put in their team name and the activity can start. There is now a name generator: if the students can’t think of a good name for their team, they can use it to produce one. This also prevents the students from choosing inappropriate names.

If the students are in teams, they should only work with one device. If you have three students working together, make sure the student in the middle has the device, so that they can all see the screen clearly.