Both Kahoot and Zondle offer teachers options for group assessment games in a way kids find engaging. Both are easy to create with whatever content you choose. Both give students immediate feedback and provide the results to the teacher in a convenient spreadsheet format. I have used both in my 1st grade class and, despite the post title above, find no reason to use one or the other exclusively. What I plan to do in this post is compare them and show the advantages of each.
Kahoot is certainly the more widely known of the two. You will either create a multiple choice quiz for your content or search for one that you can use. Teachers can also share a Kahoot quiz with colleagues directly. To use Kahoot, students need to go to the website kahoot.it and enter the code for the game which you want to use. For future convenience, have students make a shortcut on their iPad (or other device) by clicking on "Add to homescreen". On your classroom screen you show the Kahoot quiz and on their devices they see the color and shape used to represent each answer choice. After each question, students get results and the leaderboard on the big screen shows the top scorers for the class. So an advantage of using Kahoot is ease of use - you create the quiz, but there is no need to set up a class and no app to download. On the other hand, the students do not see the answer choices on their devices - just the color and shape. This can be hard for younger students to manage. This also means it's confusing to make geometry quizzes because the shape that represents the answer may mislead students. (If answer choice A is triangle, but the Kahoot symbol for A is a blue circle...)
Zondle is the platform I use more often because it offers more choices. It does require teachers to set up their class on the Zondle website in advance. Kids download the app on their devices and then stay logged into the app. Like Kahoot, you build your quiz on the website (easily including text and images) or search for one by someone else. With Zondle you don't directly share your quiz by emailing it to a colleague, but others can "friend" you and have direct access to quizzes you create. In Zondle you can create multiple choice, matching, sequence, or text/number entry questions which gives you more options than Kahoot. However only the multiple choice quizzes can be used on group play. Also in Zondle the student devices show the whole question and answer choices (not just a color and shape code) which makes it easier for students to use. After each question, like Kahoot, students get immediate feedback on their answers. Zondle can also be used independently by students. They go to the app and to whatever set of questions they need to practice. This gives you the ability to have different kids working on different levels or different skills which makes differentiating easy. Students can play these question sets on "quick quiz" (just the questions) or Zondle will embed your questions and answers in a game (short game breaks after a few questions). So Zondle requires some extra set-up at the beginning, but then gives you more flexibility in how you use your quizzes. Zondle provides a "gradebook" with all your students' results that can be searched by topic or student and that tells you most recent scores, average scores, exact questions missed, etc. It also allows you to award Zondle badges to students which they can see within the app. Because you set up your students in classes, it is important to do one extra thing if your students will use Zondle quizzes in more than one teacher's class. You can set up a school group in Zondle so students only have one account to log into, but can see all the topics that are assigned to them by any of their teachers. This is necessary to prevent students from having multiple Zondle accounts with different user names and passwords...
So how do I use Kahoot and Zondle in class? In the whole class format, both work well for:
* beginning of class warm-up or review of a previous skill
* quick assessment for grouping students within a lesson
* summative assessment of a unit or topic
Because Kahoot quizzes are generally only used once, I have used them for review of high frequency spelling words or practicing a spelling pattern, quick math warm-ups, and science unit quizzes.
Because Zondle quizzes are generally reusable (both because they are done independently and because the question order and answer order are randomized) I have a whole bank of question sets I use in math for practice and assessment. I make question sets that increase in level of difficulty and students can work their way through them so they practice a skill at their level and move on when ready. Zondle questions can also be used for practice at home.
I could write a whole post on how to create the quizzes, but really both Kahoot and Zondle are pretty easy to figure out. One tip for Zondle: when making graphics, save them as .png files instead of .jpg because I have found the .jpg graphics sometimes get distorted when viewed on the iPad. This is a problem when your shapes are stretched so that the square is no longer a square or the equal fraction parts are no longer equal... If you want easy access to my 1st grade math questions (over 50 sets so far...) send me a Zondle friend request. Then you just need to copy any of my quizzes you like and you'll have your own copies to use or revise.
I hope this gives you enough of an overview that you can decide which platform would serve your needs best. If you have any questions or further ideas for using Zondle and Kahoot, please share!
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