10 routines for teaching online – #8 Kahoot! – “Did you know or did you guess?”

by / Thursday, 15 October 2020 / Published in Teaching with Technology

BKDATCDPrepSomething I started to do recently during my live online sessions with faculty is to stop and give a short quiz about something. As you probably know, I use Nearpod for a lot of my live sessions, but not long ago learned of an interesting routine for using Kahoot! to introduce new topics. I highly recommend this video from the “inventor” of the blind Kahoot!

I designed a blind Kahoot! for my session entitled “Bloom’s Knowledge Dimensions and the Cognitive Domain”, whereby I introduce new material, discuss the concepts, then practice identifying the concepts with faculty. This is done through a series of the ever more interesting gamified multiple choice questions found in Kahoot!. When faculty give answers to the earlier questions, when the concepts are new, I will pause to see who got the answers right or wrong. Then, I ask a simple question: “For those who got this answer right, did you know it or did you guess?” I ask this and hope that faculty will be honest. This is a bit of formative assessment that can help me see that the design of the material is working as intended.

The other thing I’d suggest when using Kahoot! is to ask who got it right and how they know they got it right. This helps you understand how students are working with your material, and shows if they really have learned it through the explanations they give. It’s worth the extra class time, and it’s good if students supply answers for other students to monitor, knowing that they might  be put on the spot in future, when such interactive online quizzes are done.

Kahoot’s website even has a link to a blind kahoot template, so that you can begin to construct one. Just make sure to stop after each question, and see who guessed, or who knew the actual answers and can explain them to some further depth.


This is a new series of tips for teaching online. This series focuses on the small things, in this case, small routines that you can, and should, easily incorporate into your every day instruction online. These routines address student motivationparticipation, and metacognitive training leading to higher order thinking skills that focus on the conceptual and metacognitive knowledge dimensions from Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001).

Previous posts in this series include:

#10 Reflection

#9 A language pause

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