Category: Free Inquiry

The Technology in Education course has encouraged me to consider the ways in which technology can be brought into art classes to support and enhance student learning. Kahoots are a popular teaching tool used in many subjects but I have not seen them used in art class, so for this technology exploration I wanted to consider the potential use of Kahoots in art. After exploring Kahoot and considering how I might introduce it to an art class I came up with the following possible uses:

• Assess understanding of new content (perhaps following a lesson)
• Assess prior knowledge of concepts in art
• Fun activity to familiarise students with popular artwork/artists

To practice making a Kahoot, I created a quiz which could be used following a lesson to check for understanding. The quiz I created would test students on their understanding on composition strategies used for developing artwork.

I found the process of creating the Kahoot to be relatively intuitive, although not having access to premium features greatly limited the options and functionality. I was surprised to find the variety of question types which could be useful for creating Kahoots that do more that just assess student understanding a basic concepts/definitions.

For this example, I created a Kahoot which I imagined could be used following a lesson on art composition strategies to check for student understanding of the concepts and terminology. I imagine that using a Kahoot after giving a lesson could be helpful to engage students in the content in a fun and exciting that is low stakes.

Ultimately, I believe that using Kahoot in an art class could be a helpful teaching tool for some lessons and learning goals. Its usefulness however, would be limited to the teaching/learning of art theory, concepts and definitions and would not help with the teaching/learning of physical art skills. Kahoots may be challenging to bring into the classroom however, as new the phone ban limits the use of personal technology in schools, and not all students have access to a device.

I have learned in my Art Curriculum course that getting to know your students and their interests is crucial to developing engaging lessons. The use of a survey to gauge individual student’s prior knowledge, experience and interest was suggested by my Professor as a simple way to collect information at the start of the semester. Inspired by this suggestion, I have explored the use of Google Forms to create such a survey.

I found Google Forms to be a simple and intuitive tool for creating a welcome survey to collect information about students’ interests and preferences. Google Forms allows for a variety of question types such as short response, multiple choice and linear scale. I tested different question types in my form such as multiple choice for indicating a favourite type of art and the linear scale for ranking how much they enjoy art.

I believe that Google Forms would be a useful tool in my future classes to easily collect information from students. I can imagine creating other useful forms such as for self assessment, formative assessment and class feedback.