Play And Learning With KAHOOT!: Enhancing Collaboration .

Journal of Language and Literacy Education Vol. 15 Issue 1—Spring 2019Play and Learning with KAHOOT!: Enhancing Collaborationand Engagement in Grades 9-16 through Digital GamesLauren Zucker&Audrey A. FischAbstract: This Voices from the Field piece tells the story of a fortunate meeting on Twitter between a highschool teacher and a college professor that blossomed into an exchange of KAHOOT! games and therecognition of shared pedagogical beliefs. KAHOOT! is a web-based platform that allows users to easily createand play interactive, multiple-choice-style games. The authors used KAHOOT! games in their respective&classrooms to teach MLA format and academic integrity—traditionallydry topics that were enhanced byplaying games. Through the use of KAHOOT! games, the students and teachers were able to play their wayinto substantive and student-centered discussions. The authors discuss the opportunity Twitter provided forprofessional development and collaboration, their students’ experiences playing KAHOOT! games in class,and their reflections on using games to promote active learning. The piece concludes with recommendationsfor educators to make use of digital collaboration tools to connect and share expertise with colleagues acrosseducational sites and levels in order to work together to meet the learning needs of new generations ofstudents.Keywords: games, technology, composition, high school and higher educationDr. Lauren Zucker (@LGZreader) teaches high school English in Allendale, New Jersey, and has taughteducation courses at Fordham University and Drew University. Her research interests include adolescents’digital literacies, reading motivation, and self-regulated learning, and her recent work has been publishedin English Journal and English Leadership Quarterly. Learn more about her research and teaching atwww.laurenzucker.org. Contact her at: lauren6@gmail.com.Dr. Audrey A. Fisch (@audreyfisch) is Professor of English at New Jersey City University. Her currentresearch centers on pedagogy, literacy, and assessment. With Susan Chenelle, she is co-author of the UsingInformational Text series, which explores the use of non-fictional, multimedia, and non-traditional textpairings to unpack the relevance of canonical literature. Contact her at: afisch@njcu.edu.1

Journal of Language and Literacy Education Vol. 15 Issue 1—Spring 2019Teachers Learning in Playful Spaces1Previously, she had doubted that Twitter could everbe called professional:fter a fun day of playing review games aboutMLA format on the KAHOOT!2 (Kahoot!)website with her high school students,Lauren logged onto Twitter. A quick perusalof tweets from professionals in the field typicallyoffered ideas, suggestions, and inspiration.3 Shenoticed the first tweet in her Twitter feed, fromAudrey:AI created my professional Twitter account[during a professional developmentworkshop] without any intention of using itbeyond that day. I imagined this would belike one of the many technologies Iobligingly toyed with during a professionaldevelopment session, and then promptlyfiled away and abandoned. I thought Twitterwas a place for celebrities to talk aboutthemselves and for the rest of us to share ourbanalities; I didn’t think I could accomplishanything meaningful in 140 characters.(Goldberg, 2014, p. 30)My college students are having fun playingsilly @GetKahoot games to review MLA styleand grammar. This would be so boringotherwise! (@audreyfisch)Lauren couldn’t believe it. She replied immediately:My 9th grade high school students were justplaying a @GetKahoot game to review fortheir MLA format test! If you are willing totrade kahoots, I bet they would get a kick outof trying to take yours and vice versa!#connectedclassrooms (@LGZreader)Twitter is what Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel,Clinton, and Robison (2009) referred to as aparticipatory culture (p. 7)—a contemporarylearning environment that requires new literacieswhile encouraging creativity, collaboration, andsharing. Before Jenkins et al., Gee (2004) wroteabout affinity spaces (p. 67); face-to-face or onlinespaces for groups to organize around sharedinterests and learn informally. These types oflearning environments are fertile spaces forconnected learning, which “combines personalinterests, supportive relationships, andopportunities” (Connected Learning Alliance, n.d.,What is Connected Learning?).Audrey replied:Why not? Message me! (@audreyfisch)This was not the first time Lauren had made ameaningful connection with a fellow educator overTwitter. Since 2013, she had made a consciousdecision to expand her Professional LearningNetwork (PLN)4 (Goldberg5, 2014). Simply put, shemade an effort to follow teachers and scholarswhose work she found engaging.Lauren and Audrey had never met in person. Theyfound each other on Twitter through their shared13We acknowledge that there is a gender spectrum andthat myriad pronouns exist that we can use whenreferring to individuals in our writing. Throughout thisarticle we use pronouns to refer to individuals thatcorrespond with the pronouns that they use to refer tothemselves.2The name KAHOOT! is used with permission inaccordance with Kahoot AS’s trademark agreement.The authors are grateful to Susan Chenelle, the peerreviewers, and the editors at JoLLE for their usefulsuggestions and feedback on this piece.4For further reading on Professional Learning Networks(PLNs), see Trust (2012) and Trust, Krutka, and Carpenter(2016).5References to Zucker and Goldberg all refer to co-authorLauren Zucker.2

Journal of Language and Literacy Education Vol. 15 Issue 1—Spring 2019interest in education. The two educators weresomewhat familiar with each other throughprofessional circles and had connected virtually onTwitter by following each other, reading, andsometimes responding to each other’s tweets. Thissmall, virtual connection facilitated acommunication that quickly developed into acreative collaboration between their classrooms andlater, an opportunity to work as writing partners.Their shared willingness to jump in the “sandbox”and play with technology (Turner, 2013), led toacademic outcomes that hardly felt like work at all.“What do I write if there’s more than one author?”Lauren’s classroom was abuzz with studentconversations about MLA citation and plagiarism.She had given students a deceptively simpleassignment to make their own MLA study guidewith a partner in preparation for an MLA test. Theyhad to cover the major topics listed on the board: intext citations, incorporating quotations, plagiarism,formatting essays and titles, and bibliographicentries. Lauren had taught some of these topics asthey arose in class and in student writing, but thisactivity marked the first and only extended classtime dedicated to focused study on these topics.Playing Review Games in Lauren’s Classroom“I don’t think we need a page number if we’re citinga website.”When the class was about halfway through theirwork, Noreen and Ana6 eagerly approached Lauren’sdesk to show off their completed study guide for herapproval. Given the speed of their work, Laurenexpected to find some inaccurate or incomplete“Wait. How do I find the year ofpublication?”Figure 1. Screenshot of a KAHOOT! question with four answer choices created by students inLauren’s class6Noreen’s and Ana’s names are used with parentalpermission; the students requested that their real namesbe used.3

Journal of Language and Literacy Education Vol. 15 Issue 1—Spring 2019information and was poised to send them back totheir seats with a copy of the MLA Handbook tosearch for answers as she had done with otherstudents. Their study guide was thorough andflawless, however. Since they had finished early, shesuggested the students quiz each other.colleagues eschewed devoting time to MLA rules,given that students outsourced their bibliographyformatting to websites like EasyBib and CitationMachine.But Lauren believed that the nuances of format andacademic integrity were critical for her students tomaster before college. Indeed, many teachers at alllevels dread teaching these topics because theyassume someone else is covering them, or becausethey think the students already know what theyneed to know, or because the material is dry andboring.Lauren immediately thought of KAHOOT!, a gamebased online platform that allows users to createinteractive quizzes for invited participants to takevia a personal electronic device. She had used theplatform occasionally to create review games whenshe determined that simple, multiple-choicequestions could reinforce students’ learning. Laurenasked if they were interested in creating a KAHOOT!quiz for their classmates to review for the test. Sheoffered two extra credit points as compensation.Audrey shares Lauren’s worries that the stakes forstudents are high. If a student doesn’t know how toincorporate quotations, that student mightparaphrase in a misinformed“Yes! And we’ll make it reallyattempt to bypass a citation.“In an effort to teach thesehard to try to trick the class!”Confusing or ignoring theskillsthen,LaurendesignedaAll three of them delighted inrequirement to referencelesson that paired the studentthe idea, and the studentssources has far-reachingeagerly returned to theirconsequences. Students’creation of MLA study guidesdesks to work on their newmisconceptions andand KAHOOT! quizzes.”project while their classmatesinsecurities about MLAcompleted their study guides.format can result in aninability to demarcate their own ideas from others’;The next day, Lauren gave the students feedback onas we have both seen in our high school and collegea draft of their KAHOOT! game. She was pleasedteaching contexts, this inability can escalate towith their progress and looking forward to sharingaccusations of plagiarism with serious ramifications.the students’ game with her ninth-grade classes.In an effort to teach these skills then, LaurenApproaching an Old Topic with New Tricksdesigned a lesson that paired the student creation ofMLA study guides and KAHOOT! quizzes. RatherLauren did not always teach MLA format andthan provide students with the rules to memorize,academic integrity explicitly, but as she grewLauren hoped these activities, completed in pairs,frustrated over years of marking errors that could bewould offset the difficulty and dryness of the topiceasily corrected, she began adding more lessonsand make the experience productively social andthroughout the school year. In contrast, some of hereffective.colleagues had done away with teaching certainaspects of MLA format. For example, they mightLauren was aware of the research: Students learnteach the MLA heading, and in-text citations, butgrammar and writing topics best in the context ofnot bibliography formatting. A few of Lauren’s4