Our blogger today is Maria Esterline, a 6th Grade Teacher at Westfield Intermediate School in Westfield Washington Schools.
On a recent professional development session that my school district provided for 5th-8th grade Science and Social Studies teachers, our Literacy Instructional Coach Mrs. Amber Van Den Berg and Director of Professional Development and Assessments, Lynn Schemel shared an amazing and interactive tool with us as a way to help us bring awareness to our students about understanding of Root/Base in all subject areas. Through the interactive tool of Kahoot.it our team of teachers were incredibly engaged in the competitiveness (in a fun way) that this tool has to offer. I found it to be easily implemented back into my content area in the my classroom in so many different ways. I hope that you will find great use for this as well. There are Public Kahoot games that has already been created and you can adapt to the questions to personalize for your own.
I have use the Kahoot.it as a review game for our Solar System chapter test. Kahoot can be compared to that other quick assessment tool such as Socrative and PollEverywhere. The twist to Kahoot is that the students do not have the question displayed on their personalize screen. The students has to look on the projector screen/interactivewhiteboard to see the question. Once they see the questions and the answer choices, they select the options that is displayed on their screen. The sky is the limit with the various options that you can do in ensure the check of understanding for an upcoming assessment in your class. This is a tool that can be use for elementary to high school. This is not a brand new shiny tool but a tool that engages the students in a fun atmosphere. Each time the teacher get the game started, Kahoot.it give the players for the game a game pin. This game pin changes all the time. Once the students received the game pin, they enter the game room and give themselves a nickname. The way the game is set up is that you provide x amount of time for the students to answer the question and the person/team that answer the question the fastest get the most points. The students absolutely LOVE LOVE <3 this incredible tool. I had several students that were so inspired by this tool that they created an account for themselves, and created a review game for class presentation to engaged their peers. Some students even practiced by facetime their friends so that they can play the game on their own. It is a WIN-WIN-WIN for all stakeholders.
Our generation of students are so intrigued by the novelty of technology. Why not allow them to OWN their Learning in this digital world. Alan November wrote a book called Who Owns the Learning? An incredible book that has really inspired me to discover ways to help guide students toward taking ownership of their learning #LOYO (Learn. On. Your. Own). Our digital natives has the information of knowledge at their fingertips. Why not inspire the students to make discovery that will help them appreciate the learning process. I cannot say enough great things that has came out of this incredible tool. This tool has created higher level of engagement and developed the problem solvers of the world in this digital age. I hope you will find incredible uses as you consider utilizing this tool in your environment. If you have discovered other way to implement this tool, please tweet me @learnwithmaria.
Thank you for reading this post. Below are some pics of the students in my classroom playing a review game via Kahoot.it. One other detail about this is that if you want to create or search for your own game, you need to go to the following link https://getkahoot.com/ but when the students or participants want to play the game, they go to https://kahoot.it/#/. Please tweet me @learnwithmaria if you have any questions. Go Kahoot!!!! How are you going to Kahoot.it in your environment? Please share!!! Westfield <3 Kahoot. Special thanks to our district Instructional Literacy Coach Amber Van Den Berg, and Director of Professional Development and Assessment Lynn Schemel. Thanks to you two for inspiring us to be better educators for our students.