Foundations Newsletter

A tsunami of excitement:

If you had been walking down the C Block corridor a few weeks ago, you would have heard a tsunami of noise flooding through the A/C vents. That was my Level 2 class, revising vocabulary for the Week 5 vocabulary quiz, using Quizlet Live. Many of you might already be using Quizlet, or at least you may have heard of it. Quizlet Live takes what was already a very useful flashcard-type revision tool and gamifies it. My students loved it. Normally taciturn, chatty or otherwise disinterested students were screaming after getting answers right or wrong, or because they wanted to play again. The cacophony of sound was pure chaos, and for once it was music to the ears.

How it works:

You, the teacher, first log into your Quizlet account and select a card set. The card set must have at least 12 different answers, or it won’t run. For example, I have one grammar set that practices “in/on/at,” which does not provide enough different answers for a team game. After you choose your set, students go to quizlet.live, where they log in with a PIN that is generated after you start the “Live” option in Quizlet. After they enter their names, students are randomly assigned to a group of 2-4 people each. All groups are named after animals, such as Bison, Zebras, and Antelopes.

The game:

A game is organised into subsets of 12 words each. Once a game has started, each student in a group will see the same question (example: Queen Elizabeth is the _____ of the United Kingdom) on their tablet/laptop/smartphone. The answers are split between each player on the team, with only one of them having the correct option, so cooperation is vital. Each team’s progress is projected on the teacher’s screen. The goal is to get all 12 problems correct first, but if a group gets one wrong, they go back to zero and must start over again. My students liked this competitive element, and did not shout out answers to the class as a whole (as sometimes is the case with Kahoot!).   After one group wins, you can select play again, either with the same grouping or mixed up. I mixed the groups up, and then started immediately, and was surprised to see them getting up and rushing to get with their new group mates and get on with it.

My students loved it:

Energy levels were high, and nose levels likely exceeded that of United Nations safety levels, but they were so psyched!  Quizlet Live turned what is an otherwise solo-type revision activity into a fun and engaging group-based game that my students went bezerk over. Granted, each class will have its own chemistry, but this was my experience.

A suggestion:

One final word-while exciting, I wouldn’t over-use this game. When we first started using Kahoot! some time ago, it was met very positively, but with the passage of time Kahoot! fatigue set in, and it threatened to become just a game, rather than a gamified learning activity. However, Quizlet Live has proven much more energizing so far than Kahoot! ever did, and I highly recommend you try it.  To learn more, please follow this link:  https://quizlet.com/features/live.