Substitute Teachers Lounge
Substitute Teachers Lounge
Juggling Schools; Kahoot Startup
Ever juggled more than you can handle? As a sub, I often find myself spinning numerous plates at once. Let's discuss our juggling routine, and describe evolution of the educational platform, Kahoot, over the last four years and the changes it has brought about in my teaching approach.
Greg Collins Substitute Teacher's Lounge. It is August 13th. I'm shocked how many of you are already back in school? In fact, we've already got problems with some of the buses in our area not my immediate area Our school goes back on Wednesday. My first day at the moment is Friday.
Speaker 1:Today we're gonna talk about the last tool. We'll save that just a moment, but four years ago I did an episode on Kahoot and it has changed so much. Everybody needs to know about it. It's not just for the little kids. Talk to a college student this week that likes it. We're gonna start out, however, talking about juggling schedules, because I already have to do it. You may not juggle your schedule the way I did, but let's talk about it anyway.
Speaker 1:All right, guys, start with a little news item. We've already had a hiccup in Kentucky as far as the school system goes, the Jefferson County school system, the public school system, which is the area in which the Louisville schools are in. They've already had some little hiccups with their buses because they're short on bus drivers. They hired a consultant to try to help with it. They came up with a new scheme, but it just didn't work. The first day, the first couple of days, some of the kids bless their hearts got home between seven and 10 pm that night. Obviously that's unacceptable, so much so that the school did the right thing. They closed the school for the last two days and also for this foreseeable future, until they have a plan in place. Now we'll say UPS has volunteered to help out. I don't know what that's. There's all kinds of jokes you can make there. I don't think we're going to barcode our kids, but bless their hearts. All of you families that are listening to this from that little area, we are with you and we want everybody to feel safe when they go to the schools.
Speaker 1:I was just going to talk about Kahoot today, but I want to spend a few minutes at the beginning about juggling schedules. Most of what you're going to hear today has been done in one way or another in past years, but it's one of those kind of topics we need to talk about at the beginning of the school Every year. I guess I've already had to do some schedule juggling now. As you know, if you've been listening lately, I've gone from being a volleyball referee, at least during the schedule, to actually helping. You know being on a coaching staff for a high school volleyball team in our area and I'm thankful to the head coach that gave me the opportunity for that. I'm glad I've been able to contribute in both talking to players and talking them through some things, especially how it applies to the rules. I've already helped. I haven't made any of them mad. I've already had some discussions with the referees during our scrimmages In a jovial way. They're friends of mine, but you know, maybe we interpret things differently now. But I sell that to say this.
Speaker 1:All of you have certain extracurricular things. I know of teachers that teach at one school coach at a different school. Usually it's a high school for one and a middle school for the other, but not necessarily always. So here's what happened to me this week the school in which I am currently helping coach that volleyball team. They actually popped up as somebody in need for a substitute on this Friday. It was a math class. After I did, I accepted it. By the way, I'll just go ahead and tell you I'm back to accepting a job immediately and if I find out it's really not what I want, I turn it back in within five minutes so that somebody else can pick it up. I actually had a job this week that I did that because I misunderstood some things about it, but anyway. So I picked up that job on Friday.
Speaker 1:It's at the school that I it's at the school that I assistant coach with, and I got on our volleyball website and I said, hey, I'm subbing for this teacher. Do any of your kids have them in class? And they do. So that's gonna make me much more comfortable. One of the seniors had this teacher last year. She's gonna come by just to say hello and I told her feel free to step in and give some advice if she's in the situation to do so. So that happened to me first, and then I was starting to get excited. I was starting to say, well, it will be so much more convenient for me if I can sub at the school that I'm coaching at. And I'm thinking I'm not sure I want to do long-term again. I still I go back and forth. That's the juggling part. I love the fact of knowing where I'm gonna go every day for a while. At the same time, it is much more responsibility to do that than just I'm doing little air quotes here that you can't see just being a substitute teacher. Okay, so the reason being you're now integrating, you're now into making lessons, you're probably using another teacher's lesson plans.
Speaker 1:Well, guess what happened? I got a call five minutes after I had accepted this job. One doesn't really have anything to do with another. It was actually an assistant principal that I'll call a friend of mine she might even be listening and I haven't told her this yet because I really haven't made my decision. She said Mr Collins, you're one of our favorite subs to have here. I wanted you to know about an opportunity that's coming up in the middle of September. We have a lady leaving for a maternity leave and we would love to have you teach her class. It's in science.
Speaker 1:Well, I was already a little perplexed, cause that not only means I'd be subbing at a different high school for eight weeks, most likely, but that high school is also about a 20 to 25 minute drive, so it might put me behind schedule in getting to the other high school for practice. But yet, given our pay scale, it's about a $4,000 job, right. So I'm thinking and I'm thinking, and I told her the truth. I told her that I was volleyball coaching with the other school, that I was actually hoping to find something there, but I also told her I'm not saying no, but can you give me a week? And she could, of course, and I was thankful for that. That school has gone out of their way for me. I'm so thankful to have met people like that. Then it's funny, I go to practice that night and when I told the players that I had been called about the other school, they all shouted out no, you can't go there. Of course it's a little camaraderie and competition made them say that deep down I would prefer staying at the school I am at, or at least.
Speaker 1:There's also two other schools that are like basically across the street. That are middle schools and vocational schools for high school students who wanna go into specialties like nursing. All that is in the area. That was my goal, and here I am now being asked to substitute teach for eight weeks of 25 minutes away from there. So I've got a decision to make. I haven't. I think I made my decision. Tell me what you do. You've had been in situations like that before, where you're juggling Two things. Maybe it's because you want to do one thing but something else presents an opportunity. Go to the substitute teachers lounge Facebook group. Let me know what you think about that. Maybe I'll start a poll after this podcast episode has been out a few days. But that's the dilemma I'm in. I Will say this the school that is more local, close the actual school when the volleyball team is. It is rare that a day ever Goes by that you don't see a need for a substitute at that school, and that was the game that I was planning on playing this year. So I've got a decision to make.
Speaker 1:Now let's go to another tool. Now, again, I am not going to tell you Everything there is to know about Kahoot. In fact, I'm just going to do an overview. But I want to cover some things that I really don't think you're aware of. As I am typing it. In Kahootcom, you do the same and follow it off, unless you're in your car, and then do the same. I have a login, so I'm going to log in Now when you first get to the screen this is really why I want you to follow along it is going to give you, it'll eventually give you a screen that says upgrade your teaching toolkit with Kahoot. It'll give you an individual plan, a team and school plan. Maybe your school actually plays for a global plan. It'll ask for a district.
Speaker 1:There are three pipe Pricing levels. First is $3.99 a month. Second one is $7.99 a month premier for teachers. And third is Kahoot plus max for teachers $9.99 a month. It is AI Assistant and You'll see a list of things that are included. What isn't apparent at first is that there's actually still a free plan. They don't want you to see that right off the bat and most companies are like this list. It's marketing driven. But if you page about halfway down, you'll see continue with basic. That's why I'm going to click right now, because it's free, so I'm logged in.
Speaker 1:If you don't have an account, you'll have to log in on your own or establish an account, I should say. And here's some things that I want to mention to you first, okay, we've already talked about what account level. Now I have enrolled for school more. You know more the premium accounts before and they are nice. There's a lot of nice features. There's a puzzle feature where, like, if you want them to identify a famous person, it throws up like a puzzle piece and then another puzzle piece and they have to Identify that person eventually, and you can only do that with one of the premium plans. So study it, you can. I think you can go on trial for a little while. I am Looking at the home screen right now. I hope that you are too because I'm going to walk you through just a little bit of it, and here's what I want you to make note of, and probably the most practical thing on the whole page.
Speaker 1:Now I am to the point now that I love creating my own Cahoots. I've done a 20 question. I built it from the app on my phone and I did it in 30 minutes while watching a football game. So once you get comfortable with it, it's going to work out perfectly. I'm going to tell you, by the way, how I use it mainly in high school. I mainly use it there for long term, but it's still.
Speaker 1:You don't want to just go to movie questions and stuff for fun. You want to. I like to do one that's class related and then do one that, if there's time, that's more social related. Now you asked me, mr Collins, how do I do that? If I just know I'm teaching math class when I roll in at 7.30, how can I come up with a kahoot?
Speaker 1:Well, look on the left side of the screen this used to be at the top, I don't know why they moved it and look at the word discover, click, discover. Now they've got their partners that will be listed first, like Disney and Star Wars and Marvel, and there's some free ones. Then you can play with that. But look at the search bar. You can type in math. I'm going to type in math. Maybe you can type in math. Or type in something that more interest you grade. Let's go with grade nine, all right. Now look what happens when you do that. There's a whole bunch of math things that pop up with that. Now some of them will say subscribe, but go down and find the ones that are free. It will give you choices of that. Or if you just click the grade, if you know of somebody that you want to, you know I'm going to click create it by teachers, because that will help us out to find some ones that are related to what our class might be.
Speaker 1:Now, when you find one that seems to fit the bill, well, guess what? Unless the person that designed it wanted to be private, in fact, if you, I guess, if you're looking at it, they made it public. If you go down again to the second column, it's got the name, it's got start and assign. You could just play this one. Play it at home.
Speaker 1:Note all the way over to the far right how many seconds they have to answer each question. But go back over to the left. You'll see the pencil. That's an edit pencil. You can't edit this one because it's not yours. You can click the star next to that to put it in your favorite list. If you look over through the far left you'll see library. That's where your favorites will show up. But then if you go to the three dots and click those, look what you have. You could share that with somebody.
Speaker 1:But the thing I really want you to notice is that there's several options under the three dots that won't be available to you without a subscription. But you can't add it to a course. You can click the start button instead and just play that particular Kahoot, what I like to do and to me this is worth the $3 a month or whatever it is if you subscribe or you know, maybe the school you're at has a subscription and you can do it that way If you subscribe, then when you that edit button will not be grayed out. You can click it and you can make a full duplicate of that test, change the name and Make the answers different if you want to. You know I'm there's Kahoot out there because they're just created by adults that sometimes misspell words. So you could create a Kahoot From your copy you give. It's going to be by, called by default, a duplicate of, and then the name of the test that you just copied. Then you can go in there, change the question. You can add pictures, you can take pictures out, you can change the time limits, you can change the format in which you play to make it similar to quizzes, if you're into something like that, like flashcards and those kind of things. All that to say, this Kahoot's a very valuable tool.
Speaker 1:I mentioned Long-term subs, what I did. I would often make tests through Kahoot. Now, through that, if you go ahead and create a test, you need to turn off the feature that actually Flashes the standings up on the screen. The great thing about Kahoot now that wasn't in place four years ago is that you can click a Box when you're creating your Kahoot that they will actually see the answers on the device on which they're playing, like either their phone or the Chromebook. If you don't do that, well, you're going to flash the question and the answers up on the screen and there's going to be four colored blocks and Then all that's going to show up on their device are those colors and they have to click a color.
Speaker 1:If you instead turn the questions on, that's a little bit more effective. And if you turn the questions on, you don't even need to flash anything up on the screen. And again, if you're going to use it for a test, you need to turn off the rankings, unless you just want them to know that for some reason. The great thing about the test mode you can run reports from it. It will have the percentage correct and then you could actually enter the number correct and have it calculate the percentages right into. If you're using Infinite campus, you can. You can use it for that and all that good stuff. So we've talked about juggling schedules. We've talked about using Kahoot. Have a good week as you go back to substitute teaching.
