ClassKick makes giving real-time feedback to your students easy!
Community Review for Classkick
My Take
ClassKick quickly became one of the most used apps in my math classroom. Using it everyday could become boring for students, but using it once or twice a week for individual practice seemed to be just the right amount. I liked how easy it was to add content to the slides and that students are able to get to the assignment quickly with an access code. I did have some trouble with the roster in that unlocking the roster allows for students to type in their name with a variation. For example "Annie" and "annie" could both be on the roster for the same student. Locking the roster helps with this, but students must login the same way each time.
Being able to write with the drawing tool or use the virtual stickers made giving feedback pretty quick. Keeping up with all the students, especially in a larger class can present a challenge. If many students were virtually raising their hand, it was sometimes difficult to get to everyone. Within the app, you can enable students to give feedback to each other, but this requires some guidance from the teacher to the students on how this should be used. If you allow students to help each other, students are able to write on each other slides and could become a distraction if not addressed before enabling this feature.
I liked that all assignments are saved in the teacher dashboard which is easy to navigate. Reliable wireless is a must for this app. While I used ClassKick in a math classroom, I could see it being used across content areas.
How I Use It
I used ClassKick in a middle school math classroom for students to do individual or partner math tasks. I would take a picture of problems or work that I wanted students to do. From the ClassKick app, it is very easy to access the picture in your camera roll, crop, and add the picture to a slide. Generally, I would only add one problem per slide. You can also easily write or type directions, add voice instructions, or even a hyperlink to the slides. I found the set up of the slides to be very quick and simple to do.
Once an assignment was made, I shared the class code with students and they would work individually on the task, going from one slide to the next. I also could see all students' progress from the teacher dashboard. You can see students working in real time and give them feedback which they see on their screen. I would either using the drawing tools to write feedback on student slides or use some virtual "stickers" that had general comments that I added.
I was also able to use the teacher dashboard to look for similarities in misconceptions, as they are working, and pulling that small group of kids to work with them on that particular struggle. I used a flexible grouping strategy. The group is simply formed by a common misconception on that particular content/task. The app also allows students to virtually raise their hand so I could see when someone needed help.
The other thing you can do with a tool like ClassKick, is differentiate the work. You could easily and quickly create different assignments to meet the needs of different learners. The other way to differentiate is to create slides that go progressively deeper. You might want all of your students to, let's say, the content/work on slides 3-8, but you create slides 1-2 as an entry level to the task and you create slides 9 and 10 with conceptually deeper content that goes beyond the standard. So all students will start on slide 1, have access to the content, and then work at their own pace through the slides. More advanced students will get to the conceptually deeper content on slides 9 and 10, but many or most will be able to at least complete slides 3-8.
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