In the first two weeks of classes when I was subbing at MES, our media specialist used Kahoot to introduce/review the Learning Commons with all students. They loved the Kahoot she created and getting to collaborate with a buddy to answer questions.
When I subbed for 17 days in a special needs class at NPE, I decided to use Kahoot to assess social studies understanding on Eastern Woodlands Native Americans. I first tried a Kahoot that had already been created. It was too wordy. So I created my own, took off the points, and gave each question the maximum time allowed. My special needs students loved that one.
- Steps for creating a Kahoot.
- Go to the Kahoot website and create an account.
- Choices are to locate the perfect Kahoot already created by someone else and use it, duplicate one and revise it to meet the standards you are teaching, or create you own!
To edit someone's Kahoot, duplicate it first.
To make one from scratch, use the Quiz, Discussion, or Survey Button. Each Kahoot needs a title, brief description, and audience. They are much more interesting if images are added.
Now you are ready to add your first question. Click on the "+" Add Question Button. Give at least two answer choices and indicate the correct choice with a green check mark. Click Next to save the question and add another one.
Keep adding questions and images to your Kahoot. When finished click "Save" and either edit, preview, play, or share it.
To administer the formative Kahoot assessment, log into getkahoot.com and sign in. Click on My Kahoots at the top left. Decide if you are playing 1:1 devices or sharing devices. Decide on Game Options.
Students go to the Kahoot.it app on their iPhone or iPad. They put in the code displaying for the class. They give themselves or their team a nickname. They look to see if thier nickname is displaying on the screen.
Once all students are in, the teacher clicks on start and proceeds through the assessment questions.
Once all questions have been answered, you’ll be able to collect feedback on the kahoot from your learners and download results. If this was a public kahoot you want to use again later, you can also ‘favorite’ the kahoot so you can find it easily from your “My Kahoots” > “My Favorites” page. You can also play it again immediately, or even play it in Ghost Mode. What is Ghost Mode? At the end of the game, you'll see the winner's name displayed. Click Feedback & Results, and then click Final Results. You should now see a Ghost Mode button at the bottom of the scoreboard. Click Ghost Mode to launch the game again and play against the scores from the first game.
What is blind mode? That is when you use probing questions to teach a topic/subject using Kahoot? Each question provokes discussion and learning. Click here to learn more about Blind Kahoot'ing.
Some other information about Kahoot that you might find interesting:
- Can I use one email on multiple accounts?
- Technically, their platform requires a unique email for each account. But if you add "+" and additional text to the local-part of your email, you can use it multiple times. Here's an example:
- Say you have John and Jane in your class and your email is "teacher@school.com", you can use "teacher+john@school.com" for John and "teacher+jane@school.com" for Jane. Or you can use "teacher+1@school.com" for John and "teacher+2@school.com" for Jane. It really doesn't matter what you place after the "+" as long as it's unique each time you use it on our registration form.
- Once done, all emails for these accounts will come to your inbox.
Who developed Kahoot and why? The Kahoot! platform and brand was developed by the founding team led by Johan Brand, Jamie Brooker, Asmund Furuseth and Morten Versvik. The technology platform itself is based on the research conducted by Morten Versvik for his Master’s degree at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and based on research carried out by Professor Alf Inge Wang and his colleagues at NTNU. The Pedagogy and User Experience is based on work by Jamie Brooker and Johan Brand, developed while working at their behaviour design company We Are Human in London. Asmund leads the Business Development aspect of Kahoot!
- What is the technology used in creating and making Kahoot work. Kahoot! uses an architecture called ‘microservices’. Instead of writing one big application that handles everything a user can do in Kahoot!, we divide the code up into lots of smaller applications that are responsible for running a small part of Kahoot!
- On our servers, we mostly run Java. All the code that handles creating, reading, updating, and deleting things like user accounts and kahoots is written in Java, and data is stored in a Couchbase database. Servers are located in France, Germany, and Canada.
- We also have some code written in JavaScript using node.js - this includes some of the code that handles the playing of Kahoot! Games.
- The user interface for kahoot is built using web technologies - so we use HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
How do your make money and will you charge teachers to use Kahoot in the future? Up until now, we’ve been soft-funded by angel investors and Founder/employee investment. We’ve also launched some successful pilot corporate accounts. We intend to monetize through premium services and solutions offered to corporates. Therefore, it’s our commitment to keep the Kahoot! platform as it currently is free for teachers.
