Let's look at their Kahoot feedback to me. If you looked just at this picture, you'd think that I was torturing my students. They hadn't had much fun, they didn't learn much, if anything, few would recommend the game to others, and the majority of the students felt unhappy afterwards. But the results in the classroom? They were literally begging me to play it again. I mean - literally. |
I've made three quizzes so far, mostly for my DP music students. I have a quiz on alto and tenor clefs, one on identifying semitones and whole tones using a piano keyboard, and another one identifying chromatic and diatonic semitones. For the younger students, I have favourited games made by other teachers, including naming notes and note values. The level of enthusiasm and engagement is equally high throughout the grades, with my grade 11s just as excited about the games as my grade 6s. I had initially worried that the games were more fun than learning (as often happens). However, by watching the achievement results growing throughout the game, I saw how they were learning and adapting as it continued. When I downloaded the results, I could see specifically how the students became better and better by throughout; by the end of the game, the students were getting perfect.
I'm going to continue with Barbara Wharram, Fux, and my other 'proper' theory sheets because I need to know that my students' learning is progressing chronologically and systematically. However, I think I'm going to always start with a game whenever we learn a new concept... to use it as both immersion / hook and learning. My grade 9s are currently drawing major scales, marking the tonic, subdominant, dominants, semitones, etc. I'm going to experiment with this program and see how I can use it to teach the concepts before the kids have to sit down to their practice pages. In time, it'd be cool to get the kids to make their own game quizzes for their peers.
Here's a screen capture I made of Kahoot. If you are in China, you'll need a VPN to access it (sorry about that).