6 things to Kahoot about

Today I finally used Kahoot with my learners. I'd heard about it last year, but never given it a go until now and already I can see so much potential with this digital learning tool. 

This time used it to recap on what we had learned in the Life Education van last week. Learners were able to show their recall of information and those who didn't remember something had a way to engage with the information in a fun and exciting way.





There were several features of Kahoot which I really liked. 

1. No student logins. Just give them a Game Pin, a digital device (smartphone, tablet, laptop or computer) and they are ready to go!
2. It tells you if you the correct answer immediately 
3. It stops after each question, so you can do a quick bit of teaching for those who weren't correct (or to explain what the other options actually mean). 
4. It keeps a leaderboard telling each individual participant how close they are to the person ahead of them, great motivational feature. 
5. You get a spreadsheet of who answered for analysis, which can be saved straight to your Google Drive. 
6. The children love it!

Kahoot also offers a survey and discussion features which I yet to try out, but am looking forward to using. 

The only downside I have found so far is that it's only multi-choice, that aside, it's a great tool to motivate engage and learn through. 

If you're still not convinced try our Kahoot about body systems and the brain! 

Updated April 8th 2015

This term I also used Kahoot to give students time to practice using google to search for information on the internet. Previous experience shows me that learners don't know how to use keywords, merely typing their whole question or using keywords which are not related to what they want to find out. 
So I set up a current events Kahoot, that learners would need to search answers for. I prompted them to open Google search in another tab and gave 120 seconds per question to be answered. For the first few we paused and discussed who used what keywords to search, what was the most effective? 
As the quiz continued they got faster and faster at searching.  I will definitely repeat this lesson and maybe use it as a formative assessment for our next topic study. 



This blogpost relates to RTC 9.iii. Modify teaching approaches to address the needs of individuals and groups of ākonga. 

eduCanon for learning

This afternoon I spent some time exploring digital tools to aid learning.

I found a youtube clip and added questions using EduCanon.

Adding questions was really easy, though it did prompt me to subscribe to an annual fee to unlock extra question functions.

I can see this tool being really helpful to enhance videos that are shared in the class so that learners have to listen more actively and immediately apply information.  Though because of the questions it may stop them from replaying the video.

Have a look at my eduCanon Lesson created today, you'll need to enter an email address and responses will be sent to me. 
Let me know if you've used it before or other similar products which may be more user friendly.

Exploring digital footprints with 9 and 10 year olds.

This week my year 5 & 6 learners were learning about digital footprints as part of our cybersmart programme. Most of these learners are new to having their own personal device, so it's really important that they make a good start to their digital citizenship journey.
After watching a short film and brainstorming what we already knew, it was clear that we didn't know too much just yet, about the power and capabilities of the world wide web. We knew that we shouldn't share our address and full name because we were told not to, but didn't understand why. A learner voiced that his classmates knew were he lived anyway, so what did it matter. I showed them the hits on his blog from Christchurch, he didn't know anyone in Christchurch. This got us thinking. The internet is a public place. 

So we decided that we wanted to see just how quickly and how far things can spread on the internet. We wrote a message and shared it on my google plus account asking people to share it and tell us where in the world they were.

We were absolutely amazed by the response, and how quickly it spread so far. We learned about geography and all the places in the world that we were able to make an impact, check out the map of the progress.
The red dots were the hits within the first 9 hours. Green the next 24hrs and blue the third day. By then it seemed to have dropped off everyone's radar. 
You can view the map in more detail here. 

As you can see, within 9 hours it had spread across the world, and within 24 hours even further, with over 60 shares and over 100 different locations. Some people didn't share their location, which allowed us to investigate, looking at their profiles. This opened up the discussion about how much information some people shared, and others chose not to share. We were able to think about why this was and the choices we had. 

Besides the thrill of having responses to our post, we learned a really valuable lesson. One which had a lot more impact than any video or stories from me could have made. The children realised the potential of the internet, that it has great power to spread messages, and share our learning. But it also showed us exactly why we should keep some information private, and why we need to have a positive digital footprint. 

If you have other cybersmart lessons you would like to share with me, please do. 

Thanks for reading
Steph