Racing Towards Mastery with Quizlet LIVE

@joe_edtech/
@LisaBerghoff

A couple of weeks ago, I was conducting a site visit at DHS and we walked into one of our Spanish classes. The kids were excitedly working together, competing in teams using a tool called Quizlet Live. I've used Quizlet a lot as a flashcard generator, but I hadn't seen Quizlet Live. It is an easy to use tool that turns group activities into fun and challenging games. So, I had to ask the teachers to write about it. This is the resulting

guest post by DHS Spanish Teachers Mercedes Koch (@Profe_Koch) and Matt Wallace. 

Do your students use Quizlet to study key vocabulary terms?  Do your students like to play collaborative and interactive games in class?  If so, Quizlet Live is perfect for you and your students!

In the very recent past, Quizlet has released Quizlet Live, which takes existing Quizlet sets and creates a collaborative, interactive game using the information contained in the set.  The general idea is very similar to that of Kahoot!.  However, there are a few differences which will be highlighted below.  Here is a brief overview of how to access Quizlet Live and how to play.

Step 1: in order to access Quizlet Live, you must request access.  Email beta@quizlet.com  with your username and request access to Quizlet Live.  You will receive an email once it is active on your account and at the top of each Quizlet set you will see this icon:  

Step 2: When you are ready to start a game with a particular set, click “Live”.  You will be taken to a page with a “Create Game” link.  Click “Create Game” and the next step is when your students will become active.  The next page will look like this:

You will want to project your screen to the class so that the students can see and enter the code at quizlet.live.  They will enter their names, and the names will show up in the black portion on the right side of the page.  If a student enters an inappropriate name, simply click on the name to erase it and ask that student to re-enter their information.

Step 3: When all students are in the game, and when you click Create Game, Quizlet will randomly group the students in your class into groups of 3 or 4 and the groups will be given a team name. Apparently Quizlet is very animal-friendly because the team names are always names of animals.  You will want the students to sit next to each other during the game, so they should find their teammates and sit next to them at this point.  You are now ready to start the game.

Step 4: The actual game consists of the students seeing some sort of question posed to them, a vocabulary term for example. Then, they are given multiple options.  However, not all students on the team will have the correct answer as one of their options.  This is where the collaboration comes in. They also see the options given to their teammates.  This is what a student sees:

The middle column contains their options and the two columns on the sides contain their teammates’ options.  The students must discuss to determine the correct answer, and the student with the correct answer on their screen is the only one who can select it.

One difference between Quizlet Live and Kahoot! Is that the questions posed to one group will be different from those posed to another group.  Let’s say that your Quizlet set has 50 terms.  Each group’s questions will be a completely random sampling of those 50 terms.

Step 5: How does a team win?  When a team answers a question correctly, Quizlet Live automatically moves them onto the next question (which is different from Kahoot! where everyone is working on the same question at the same time).  While teams are accumulating points, the teacher screen tracks their points:

The first team to 12 correct answers wins. HOWEVER, when a team answers incorrectly, their points are reset and they start over at zero.  The new questions posed to the group are again chosen at random from the set, not a repeat of what they already answered.

A few extra notes:  

• If you want to play another game/round but also want change the groups, you can do so with the click of a button.  
• You can add students to the game using the game specific code.  
• After completing a game, you can see the stats of the game.  This may be helpful for identifying common misconceptions related to the content.

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I'd like to thank Mercedes and Matt for "volunteering" to write this week's post. If you are using a cool free tool to improve learning in your classroom, tell us about in the comments below - or email me and author an upcoming post!