You’ve got to read Steve’s excellent blog post about game-based learning with Wakelet and Kahoot!
Technology provides a variety of educational tools that teachers can use inside and outside the classroom to extend student learning in powerful ways. Teachers are probably familiar with many education tools by now and have experience using them for online teaching and learning during the current COVID-19 pandemic. As for me, Wakelet is one such tool that I can’t live without. I use Wakelet to curate resources of all kinds from the internet (as well as from my desktop), and organize them into collections. Whenever I need to showcase student work, Wakelet is just the right place to put those things together. Moreover, students enjoy collaborating on Wakelet to accomplish the given learning activities and assignments. This free-to-use platform has a lot to offer, with new features and updates coming out every now and since.
An education tool may have all the versatile features that a teacher may find useful to facilitate his/her instruction, however we must not ignore the critical role of community presence. A good community presence contributes positively to the success of technology adoption among teachers. Wakelet is a good example for us to learn on how to build a strong and engaging community. The Wakelet Community is a platform that brings together teachers from all over the world to nourish professional development (PD) among teachers. The team over Wakelet consistently reaches out to teachers via email and social media, inviting teachers to get involved in various training sessions, events, and competitions as well as keeping teachers up-to-date with the latest development at Wakelet.
When Malaysian ambassadors were given the green light to run the Wakelet Malaysia community on Facebook almost one year ago (It was June 30th, 2020 to be exact), we wasted no time spreading the words about Wakelet to more Malaysian educators. However, building an education community is not simply gathering people together in the same place, but cultivating a positive and dynamic learning culture among teachers. We want teachers to learn and discover inspiring ideas together to integrate Wakelet into their teaching. Wakelet has its own training sessions for teachers, but we feel that we have had the responsibility to get us as ambassadors closer to the teacher community in Malaysia.
In November 2020, we kick started our first webinar exclusively conducted in our national language i.e. Bahasa Melayu, and the rest, as they say, is history. At the time of writing, we ran a total of 9 training sessions aka webinars on Youtube – 4 in 2020 and 5 so far this year (We ran the first 4 sessions every fortnightly before we decided to switch to a monthly basis).
Our awesome ambassadors play a key role as they are taking turns as presenters to talk about the technical part of using Wakelet as well as sharing various ideas to use Wakelet in teaching and learning. We are very grateful that our fellow ambassadors are more than willing to share their knowledge within the community. Such community presence is one of the reasons why more and more teachers are inspired to start their #WakeletWave journey.
To maximize learning impact for teachers who joined our webinars, we decided to review teachers’ knowledge and understanding at the end of every webinar. It is no brainer for us to go for Kahoot! as we feel that this game-based learning platform is able to deliver a fun yet powerful assessment session for teachers. Each set of quiz ranges from 6 to 10 questions and is written in our language. We developed all the questions from scratch with a moderate difficulty level. Quiz is assigned as a challenge, rather than a live kahoot. The reason why we don’t prefer a live kahoot is mainly because of the time delay of 10 seconds before the questions are displayed on Youtube. We feel that a live kahoot doesn’t give the best experience to teachers. So we opt for Challenge mode. We set the kahoot challenge to end within 1 and half hour after the webinar has ended. This gives teachers the time to digest the knowledge that they have come to learn before they proceed to test their knowledge.
To spice things up, we offer a small prize to the winner. The top scorer walks away with an exclusive Malaysian Wakelet Community t-shirt. The t-shirt which represents the diversity of cultures in Malaysia, is designed by our fellow ambassador, Mr Adnin Azmi.
Shortly after the end of the challenge, the winner is announced and celebrated within our community on Facebook. Teachers love Kahoot! and so do us. We strongly believe that using this platform can have a positive effect on learning performance and teachers’ attitudes to continue exploring Wakelet. Apart from using Kahoot! as an assessment tool, we would love to explore more on how to use this game-based learning platform as a content delivery tool as well as a feedback tool.
