Kahoot! (Gesundheit!)

Have you Kahooted yet??? I hadn't. Until recently, I had never even heard of it.
And then twice in one week, I overheard it in conversations and finally someone came and asked me what I knew.  Time to investigate!
In my board, we have teachers that are designated as an LST which is a Learning Support Teacher. The LST assigned to our school suggested Kahoot a few weeks ago to one of our primary teachers. She was keen and checked it out. After trying it as part of her math program with her class she was thrilled. Anytime someone gets excited about anything techie I get interested so I checked it out too.

I went to the link and had several negative first impressions. My first thought was that it was kind of gimicky. It seemed like one of those games they use at a bar where people are asked trivia questions and all the results are up on a big screen for all to see. One winner and many losers! Yuck.

Why would we ever want to do that to students? How is this possibly fair to students' individual needs? Without exploring much further, I went back to the teacher and started a discussion. She quickly agreed with me and said she felt the same way until she noticed another way to use it. Firstly it turns out you don't have to display everyone's scores. You can have scores recorded into a spreadsheet, available to the owner of the Kahoot, by using the program in survey mode. Secondly, if students enter an email they can create a Kahoot to share with their peers. This is the aspect of the program that touts itself as 'flipped'. Technically, I guess so. But I just can't help thinking about all those years that students used to make 'Jeopardy' like game boards as part of a project. Is that really all it takes for a classroom to be flipping?

I like that it is easy to access and students can use any device. So far, the student feedback from that one class has been positive.  The teacher reports that they had total engagement.  I will be curious to watch this one progress, but I am not optimistic that it will have longevity.  So far, for me, it's nothing worth sneezing about.