[ola] Kahoot...
- From: Nanosh Lucas <nanoshlucas@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "ola@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <ola@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2014 07:25:42 -0800
Hello,
Have you seen getkahoot.com? It’s sort of like poll everywhere with a twist -
much easier to set up, and it looks like it would be easy to use in a classroom
full of students, many of whom have access to smartphones. It is basically an
online quizzing software. You can have students work on it individually or in
groups with one phone, iPad, or laptop. The main screen is your digital
projector hooked to your computer with the quiz running. All free, as of now.
Here is an example of my process:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnLNUMHz57M&feature=em-upload_owner
I used Voki to make a Snowman say something about his vacation, then I cropped
and broadcast the video to Youtube using a program called ScreenFlow for the
Mac. Then, I referenced the video in Kahoot and set up a quiz. (You could skip
a few steps by having you or another person simply make a video and upload it
to Youtube).
My goal is to have students in Spanish 2 be able to say something about their
vacation - it seems like the most relevant thing to do now. I’m showing them
how to say where they went, or where someone else went, through using the verb
“ir” in the preterite. This is an interpretive exercise that calls on them to
do more than correlates to their level in Spanish (NM heading to NH), but I
believe they can use their intuition to figure it out, as interpretive skills
are typically stronger than productive skills. They’ve also practiced using
this before.
I’m planning on making a few more questions for this particular exercise (Where
did he stay? Who did he visit?) and to make the statements by the avatars more
and more complex. While this set of activities seems like it’s tiered for
ability levels and awesome for class, I believe the only thing that will make
it interesting will be the medium through which students are accessing it
(competition and technology). Once those have worn off their luster, students
will become bored with it, like anything else. From this small sprout, I’m
relying a lot on the technology, but it’s very easy from here to build a solid
unit based on “Qué hiciste durante tus vacaciones?
What else I will be doing, however, is showing students a picture of me with a
full beard, and another with a mustache, and another dressed up as Donald Trump
during a murder mystery party. These are a few of the things that I did over
the break: grow a beard, chop it down to a mustache, and dress up like Donald
Trump. The question is the same - What did you do during the break? My answers
to this question are also going to be uninteresting to students even with the
emphasis of content over form (See paragraph above - all form).
In the 1st set, I expect my conversation to dry up a lot faster when I try to
run a progression from it: “Where did you go during your break?” “What did you
do?” “Some people like to stay at home, did you stay at home?” “Who visited
family?” “Who else swam at the Y?” I’m dependent on the random student or two
who has an interesting story to tell.
In the 2nd set, my conversation simply has more potential avenues - all
students have an opinion on mustaches: “Do you prefer mustaches, beards, or
neither?” “Do I look creepy in that mustache?” “Does Dalí look creepy with his
mustache?” “Who in your family has a mustache?” “Is he creepy?” “Did you visit
him during your vacation?” “Is a mustache a sign of masculinity?” “Who are some
famous people with mustaches?” “What about beards?” “Are you treated
differently if you look like Paul Bunyan than an Imam, an Orthodox Jew, or an
Amish person?” “Which one of these look more manly to you?” “Here are pictures
of people who run the world’s fortune 500 companies - how many of them have
beards?” “Is it necessary to shave?” “Should women shave?, Why or why not?" On
and on and on and on… At some point, I expect I will find a hook that will get
students talking, which will give me a new place to move to.
And basically, that to me is the essence of OWL - we are trying to get students
to talk to one another in order that their language can move from level to
level. More importantly, they move from being unable to express an idea to
another person to being able to express it. Whether one uses units or not to
accomplish that goal is immaterial. I think I’m responding to Thomas Hinkle’s
post a while back on the ambivalence of whether it might not be more
advantageous to put together solid units when compared to times when “stuck”
using OWL. What I have noticed so far, having just put together an assessment
for students based on a very strict set of sentence frames is that students
produce exactly what I’ve asked them to produce, and they seldom surprise with
their language. Whereas when my goal is to bring them something interesting to
explore, I am always surprised, excited, and even a little scared to be
swimming in uncharted territory.
I hope these ramblings are helpful to someone out there in teacher land.
Best,
Nanosh
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