Are you looking for more ways to keep your older speech students engaged whether you are teaching in person or virtually? Today I wanted to share with you my most used free website of the year and it is Kahoot!
My students are already familiar with Kahoot because their classroom teachers use it and I have found that they are also very motivated by it. And it makes my job so much easier when I can just have fun and teach instead of scrambling to try to find something that is motivating and engaging. I don’t know about you, but my students are so motivated by competition so why not take advantage of that!?
If you haven’t used Kahoot before, it is a free site that you can use with students in person and virtually where students play against each other and test their knowledge of the content you choose. You can easily make your own Kahoots by just hitting the create button and within minutes you could have a game specifically for the skill you want to work on. There are also different setup options like multiple choice answers, slow reveal where square by square the picture reveals itself, you can change the amount of time per question, and more! This program is so easy to work with and if you play around with it, you’ll quickly get comfortable with it and be able to whip out a custom game in no time.
After you have created the Kahoot all you have to do is hit play and a little menu comes up asking if you want to do classic or team mode. Make your selection and the game will start with a pin number at the top of the screen. All the students will be on their own devices and they will search kahoot.it. Once they select the website, they will have a little box on their screen to enter the pin. All they have to do is enter the number from the game screen and they are in!
Now I do have a note for if you are doing this with students who are virtual. When you play this in person your screen or smartboard will have the question and the answer choices while the students’ screen will just have the four colored squares of the answer choices. When you play Kahoot with students that are virtual, you will want to tell them to open up two screens or two tabs. They need one screen for the zoom or google meet session and another for logging into Kahoot and making their answer choices. Their screens will look similar to the picture below.
The best part about this site is that if you don’t have time to make a Kahoot, you can just go to the Discover tab and find one already made. For example, I can go search for Context Clues and tons of results will come up. I then just go through and preview a couple until I find one I like. Some of them may only have 3 questions and maybe I’m looking for a longer one. I can also preview the questions themselves to make sure they are at a level that is doable for the students I am working with.
Once I find a Kahoot I like and I want to save it for tomorrow, all I have to do is click the little star and it will add the game to my favorites list so I don’t have to go searching for it the day of.
Kahoot is great because you can tack one on at the end of a session if your students are doing really well with what you’ve been working on. Sometimes I make Kahoots about the books that we’ve read or the Pixar films that we’ve watched. Whatever skill you’re working on this is just a fun way to get more practice and it collects data too because you’ll be able to see how many they got right or wrong. And your students will absolutely love it! I have students beg me all the time to play Kahoot and it's like wow my students are begging me to learn!
I hope you love Kahoot as much as I do and if you haven’t used it yet, I know it's going to be a game-changer to keep your students motivated. The number one question I get asked is how to keep the older speech students motivated and engaged. One of my go-to answers is always Kahoot because they just simply love it.
Want to learn more? Check out the video and this Kahoot resource I mentioned for engaging, no-prep and low-prep activities to use with your students this week!
