Ultimate Engagement with Kahoot

I knew that Kahoot would be one of those things that my students would absolutely LOVE! It was chaotic in a good way, if that is even possible. My students could not contain themselves. They were just beyond excited the whole time. I am just starting to get over laryngitis and it was so difficult to be heard. I finally had to bring back the silent celebration we have used before instead of cheering wildly each time an answer is revealed. 

So here's 4 of my takeaways:

1: First, we will definitely do this again...and again...and again. They just loved it that much and it can be used for any subject area. I could see us doing it at least a time or two every month.
2: There is not a huge investment in time to set this up. It is super easy to type in some questions and possible answers. You can save your Kahoot games to use from year to year, so once they are done you will be able to reuse them in future years.
3: Some kids may not be able to handle the disappointment and competitiveness of this game. There can be some problems with some technology not working fast enough (that really upset one of my competitive students) and when a student does not win, that could set them off as well. I would still do it again, even with those challenges, but I think that if I had some students who could not handle those situations in a positive way, we would definitely need to do some prep work together about how to handle those situations that are sure to arise. 
4: It will take a while to set the students up on IPADS if you teach primary grades. My students needed help finding the website and some needed help with entering the code. They did like that they can choose a nickname to go by and they were super creative with that and enjoyed their new names.

As a side note, I did give a prize to the student who had the top score. I do not have a prize box, so I just had that student choose one of the flex seats that we have in the common area outside of our classroom and that seat became theirs for the day...BIG HIT!

So there you have it! If you want to try it out for yourself, sign up for a free account here.