Tech Tools: Gimkit
Written by Debbie Harris, Tech Tools brings you excellent technology tips to inspire you and add creativity to your teaching.

The Technology

Gimkit is an app that allows you to create quiz-show type games for your students. Similar to Kahoot, students can answer the questions in the game by clicking on the answers using their own personal devices.  

To create a game, you can work from scratch and type in the content for each question, and its accompanying answers. Alternatively, Gimkit also allows you to cut and paste the content in from Quizlet (a different gaming app). Or, you can also choose to feed the content into Gimkit directly from a .csv file.

Unlike other quiz games, when you play a game on Gimkit you can earn points, called in-game cash, that you can then use to purchase in-game upgrades. This gives the game a reward system and adds a lot of incentive to the play. You can set up your games so that players compete against each other, or, as a collaborative game, where players work as a team to achieve a goal. You can also set up your game so that students can add in their own questions as they play, making the game a truly interactive experience.

To create your own games, visit the Gimkit website and sign up for a free account.

You can see a video demonstration of Gimikit here.

In Your Classroom

• Use Gimkit as an assessment tool. Ask students to review content by answering questions. After they have completed the game, you can click on “report”, and Gimkit will display for you which student answered which questions correctly.

• Having a parent-child learning day? Invite families to play a Gimkit in teams

• Set up games in gimkit for your students to review Hebrew words, facts about the Jewish holidays, Bible stories—you can gameify any content, and make it fun to review.

 

Debbie Harris is the Director of Educational Technology at Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago and blogs at http://www.museforjews.com. Reach her at deb@debharris.com. This is the last Tech Tools column, and we thank Debbie Harris for her contributions.

 

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