First up, I wanted to learn about Kahoot. So I found a public game that had questions suitable for review for our upcoming benchmark test. I told the students I wanted them to teach me how to play. And teach me they did!
- As soon as I said we were going to play Kahoot, the atmosphere was electrified! Students were beyond eager to get started!
- I set up teams of 4 but after a few questions, students began suggesting that it would be more fun to play in pairs ... more students engaged in the problem solving!
- The game we used was created by a generous teacher unknown to us who made his or her work public. For that we are thankful. But we learned 30 questions is a bit long!
- Students pointed out that some questions had too long of a time limit ... 120 seconds were just too many. They suggested keeping most questions at 30 seconds.
- I learned that we will need an answer document to hold all students accountable.
- Kahoot definitely will be a game of choice for future formative assessment and review sessions! I can envision starting class with a 10 question Kahoot reviewing the previous day's work.
In the second half of class I wanted to explore one of the new Desmos class activities ... PolyGraph. Kahoot was such a big hit that I thought maybe Polygraph would be a let down ... but it was NOT! Students said, "This is too much fun!" They were not eager to quit and in fact, kept playing even when I offered other choices. We played the parabola version of PolyGraph this time. But very soon we will be working with Rational Functions ... and I envision PolyGraph as a great classroom activity for reinforcing vocabulary and attributes of the functions.
Our curriculum is mapped out fairly tightly, so a "free" day doesn't happen very often. The day provided the perfect opportunity to test new technologies to determine how best to use them!
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