Getting started with Kahoot

The easiest way to get started with Kahoot is to search for ready made sets. It saves you having to type things in and if you use one of the popular English coursebooks there’s a very good chance you’ll find something you can use straight away or adapt for yourself from sets made by other Kahoot users from all over the world. Teachers are creating and adapting new study sets all the time.

The more eagled-eyed amongst you will have spotted it’s the same text I used for Quizlet. Despite the reproduction ( so much nicer than calling it copying) it’s still true…

 

This is https://create.kahoot.it not to be confused with “kahoot.it “which is how you log in to play a game of Kahoot!

Sign up, but first you must declare your purpose

This yellow arrowed “socially” square is the first main clue that Kahoot is a very different animal to Quizlet, There’s also the annoying ! after Kahoot!  Also the changing of ” c” to “k”, Kahoot ! doesn’t have staff it has the Kahoot! Krew. (Mini-rant over!).

Yes it’s true – people play Kahoot for fun! Take that Quizlet! Sometimes thousands of people.  No one dances to Quizlet either

Some people shouldn’t dance to anything.

But let’s get back to the sign-up, which you know how to do , of course.

But then you see this “tell us a bit more about yourself” friendly face. These days.a lot of us are a little bit more cautious about the data we give away  It’s your choice. But for simplicity and not having my data used for dodgy political purposes, I said “no thanks!”

Put  your wishes in the search box:

 

A search for New English File Elementary produces this:

 

Notice those three options, they each take you straight to one set, but we want a wider choice, so click the search magnifying glass.

 

Take some to look around, notice the 458 results in the top left corner. With a search as specific as this, the subject option is redundant, and the grades are for USA schools.

 

These are your filters:

 

 

These are my selections:

Unlike Quizlet,which gives you the first four questions on the preview, Kahoot! gives you one example question.

 

Thinking about multiple choice questions

It may seem simple, but the design of good multiple choice questions has spawned many research papers and its own specialized vocabulary.  So, when you are writing a Kahoot you are taking on a specialist task.

David Deubelbeiss at EFL Classroom 2.0 has some useful advice on how to make multiple choice questions more learner-friendly and effective.

He says:

A typical standardized multiple choice question for language students might be;

Beth ___________ to the store every day.

a) has   b) is    c)  went    d) liked

A multiple choice test that would actually give students more success and help them learn would be them choosing the 3 appropriate language forms.

Beth ________ to the store every day.

a)  went      b) likes    c) goes   d) has gone

It’s important that students choose 3 right answers and not be asked to choose the 1 wrong answer. This way, we can give marks for right answers. This way they feel “success”.

Connie Malamed – the e-learning coach has 10 rules for you to design better multiple choice questions

 

Making your own simple set

Unlike Quizlet there is no import functions so it’s just you typing things into boxes:

 

I’m using the same Headway Elementary words that I used for the Quizlet set

The range of images is not good and is not actually searchable you get some broad categories to choose from:

I’ve used a picture of a house from my hard drive and used the upload image function, now it looks like this. Don’t forget  to choose your audience. You’ll get a reminder if you don’t, and it won’t let you go further until you do.

Click OK, go and this happens:

Click “add question”

 

As you can see I’ve chosen the time limit : 60 seconds. I’ve left points as “yes”. You have to set these for every question unless you want the default time of 20 seconds and points on by default.

Once you’ve completed all your questions, don’t forget to save.

Then you can preview:

You must do this, as it’s easy to tick the wrong answer or make a mistake, but it also shows you what the Kahoot gameplay is like: