Kahoot!

If you’ve ever used either Quizdom or the ActivInspire voting paddles, you’ll realise that they’re quite good for assessment and for plenaries. Unfortunately they have a few draw backs. For one, most schools don’t have many sets (the voting paddles are expensive) and the equipment is often bulky. This is really inconvenient when you simply want a ten minute plenary at the end of lesson.

Kahoot! aims to make things a little simpler. For a start, it’s free. That’s always a bonus as a teacher. Secondly, it’s got a nice, simple web interface that makes creating quizzes a breeze. I find the fact that Kahoot! looks lovely, with nice snappy animations also makes pupils more engaged than the comparatively boring/laggy Quizdom animations.

All you need to do is pick your questions and answers and get students to go to http://www.kahoot.it on their mobiles. There they can you use their fancy smartphones (which most kids have) to answer questions and compete. The website also has a fantastic section of public Kahoot!s you can browse and search for. I like the sharing element. I also like the idea of getting students to create their own Kahoot! as a homework exercise.

There are a few things I’m less keen on. I think quizzes often promote a frantic ‘me me’-ness that I think often ignores higher learning in favour of surface level facts. I often make the other answers common misconceptions, but I still find the class frenzied at the idea of completing the quiz and not particularly bothered about the maths.

The other problem is with Kahoot! itself. It’s a lovely website, but lacks a few features (it NEEDS image embedding for answers, so I can show a picture of a circle as a possible answer) and the initial setup can be a bit of a trial. But I’ve enjoyed using it, and I recommend that you at least try it.

It’s interesting how websites are slowly starting to fill a lot of educational need. With Desmos, Kahoot! and the new, revamped, FANTASTIC Class Dojo, I’m really excited to see what else people come up with in the next few years.

PS: Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I am going to  try and get more stuff on here soon.

KenKen Puzzles

Since finding this on TES, I’ve become midly obsessed with KenKen puzzles. They are like Sudoku (which I already think is fantastic at developing the kind of maths skills I want to see) but much more mathematcally involved.

There’s a load of these puzzles on the linked PowerPoints, or you can just Google ‘KenKen’.

OFSTED whiplash

OFSTED whiplash

Wilshaw would like to see the government reintroduce external testing at the end of key stage 1 and at key stage 3.

He said: “Talk to any good headteacher and they will tell you it was a mistake to abolish those tests. If we are serious about raising standards and catching up with the best in the world, we need to know how pupils are doing at seven, 11, 14 and 16.”

Next paragraph:

One suggestion was that pupils should be encouraged to read for pleasure more. The report said some schools were distracted by national tests, which do not always assess pupils’ wider reading skills well.

Logic Puzzles

baronRecently I’ve been using a lot of Logic Puzzles from the Printable Puzzles website. They’re a really fantastic way to get students thinking, and to get them to use logic. They also help reading two way tables.

You can get the last four days worth of puzzles for free (which is perfect for teachers) and they’re well worth checking out.

Misleading Graphs

image

I was shown this corker of a graph recently. The scales there are wonderfully deceptive.

I love a good misleading graph. They’re really good for generating discussion, especially when you delve into the difference between a graph merely being wrongly created and a graph that’s been deliberately manipulated to be misleading, as this one has.

I’ve put together a selection of my favourite misleading graphs in this PDF.Obviously you don’t have to use them as worksheet, you can cut them out and use them however you want, or simply display them on the board to talk about.

If you use this resource, let me know how you get on in the comments. I’d love for this resource to generate discussion about how it generated discussion.

Edit : DataBlog Ammp3d (a blog that I will talk about here at some point) posted a funny correction to the Conservative graph on Twitter, which is well worth discussing.

ammped