Tag: competition

Magnifying glass over a finger print
Assessment, Collaboration, Mobile

Digital scavenger hunts for building class community

Mendi Benigni

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Scavenger hunts are a great way to get your students working together for a common goal.  This is a wonderful way for them to bond as a class or to gel as a group project team.   These types of hunts can be used for assessment as well but I want to focus mainly on team and community building.

For interaction, successful group work, and/or great discussion to occur in your class there needs to be trust.  Students need to trust the instructor but more importantly, they need to trust their classmates.  This trust is what allows the students to speak their minds, voice their opinions, or contradict an instructor or a classmate.  Without this all you get is superficiality.

While building trust within a classroom is another topic in and of itself, the first step to establishing this type of environment is to get the students familiar with one another and to have them experience working as a team.  A scavenger hunt is a fun way to do this.

Check out Goose Chase scavenger hunt creator.  First, a special shout out to Melissa Negreiros from Philip Simmons Elementary who introduced me to this application.  It’s a free (mostly) digital scavenger hunt application and here are the details:

  • Free
    • Regular account allows for 3 groups in a hunt and one hunt at a time.
    • Educator account allows for 5 groups in a hunt and one hunt at a time.
    • Educator paid is <$50/yr.
  • Online
  • Built-in list of possible activities from which to choose
  • Can create your own activities customized to your students, organization, or content
  • Can set a duration for the hunt
  • Can easily invite students with a class code, no accounts required
  • Can password protect it

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Uses:

  • Group community building
  • Class community building
  • Icebreakers
  • Content assessment
  • Field trip engagement
  • Brain break
  • Learn about campus resources

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Kahoot Challenge
Classrooms, Distance Ed, instructional technology, iPad, Mobile, Pedagogy

Kahoot! Now Has A New Out-of-Class Feature!

Mendi Benigni

Kahoot mobile screenshotKahoot! is a game-based learning platform that, up until now, could really only be used face-to-face.  But great news, it now has an out-of-class feature as well that can be used for homework or for online courses.  I know many of you teaching online has wanted to use Kahoot! but haven’t been able to.  Well now you can!

The new feature is called Challenge and does require the Kahoot! App to play.  When you (or your students) want to start a Challenge just click on an existing Kahoot! (or you can make a new one) and at the top, click Challenge.  You then set a due date by when the challenge must be completed.  Lastly, you are given a Challenge link and PIN that you then share with your students, either via OAKS, Email, or Google Classroom.  The student really just needs to type in the PIN into the Kahoot! app and they go on with the game as they would in class.  At the end, the instructor can see how everyone in the class did.

The only thing I’m not in love with is that Challenges can’t be done on a computer and most young children (for EHHP) don’t have cell phones or iPads.  For a college classroom this shouldn’t be an issue.

Here’s how it works:

Kahoot! can be used to:

  • Review, revise and reinforce
  • Re-energize and reward
  • Get classroom insights
  • Gather opinions
  • Motivate teamwork
  • Challenge past results
  • Join global classrooms
  • Introduce new topics
  • Great for competitions
(taken from Inspiring Ways to Kahoot! )

Also, as you learned above, there is a new mobile app to make it even easier to join and play!  Check it out on their Mobile app page.