A few years back I did a piece on Kahoot which is a brilliant free website for creating quizzes to use in class. Typically the teacher using Kahoot displays the questions on the interactive whiteboard and the students answer the questions on any internet-enabled device. It works really well as an assessment for learning technique to check on how well a class understands a particular topic area before/after you teach it.
Usually the quiz has to be run “live” with a whole class. But it’s now possible to set a Kahoot for homework, and to have students access it in their own time (and at their own pace) via the Kahoot app for iOS and Android.
To run a Kahoot for homework challenge, first you need to have created a Kahoot, or searched Kahoot for a quiz created by someone else who’s kindly shared it. There are currently 1000’s them available on the Kahoot homepage. Once you find the Kahoot you want to use simply click on the Challenge button.
On the Challenge screen you can decide how long the quiz should be active for, to give the students a deadline for completing it.
This screen will also give you the URL for sharing via email and other platforms as well as a PIN that the students can enter directly into the Kahoot app to access it.
In the Kahoot App, the students will get the option to enter the PIN of the quiz they want to complete. They can then work through the quiz questions at their own pace. The app breaks the questions into chunks of three and shows them how well they are doing as they go along. They can stop at any time and pick up again later as long as the challenge is still active.
When the deadline is reached, the teacher can go into the “My Results” section at the top of their screen in Kahoot to see all the scores from the quizzes they’ve set in the past.
Clicking on the download button will create an Excel spreadsheet with all the important information about the quiz – overall scores and question by question breakdowns.
I use Kahoot a lot in class and it’s always been very popular with the children. But with the homework mode it can be used in a whole new way.
The only drawback is that the challenge needs to be accessed via the Kahoot app – so that means students need access to an IOS or Android device. This shouldn’t be an issue since this includes most phones and tablets. The Kahoot app is free, and you can get it here on Android or iOS.