🕒 10 min read
Overview
As a teacher, you do formative assessments on a daily basis because you want to assess your pupils' comprehension and tailor your instruction to their needs.
With consistent feedback, formative evaluations assist you to encourage student improvement and achievement. There’re plenty of platforms that can support you to do this digitally.
But what about conveying concepts or learning materials to students? Isn't the learning process more important than just checking what they understand? Don’t you want to enrich your students with the most needed and important skills of the future?
It is critical to foster growth in all of the 4C skills of 21st century learning—communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. Not only are these abilities valuable on their own, but by combining them, students are empowered to solve their own challenges, collaborate, and come up with solutions. Also, these skills help students to succeed in school and in their future workplace.
In this blog post, we compare Kahoot and Rolljak to show you how they can support your teaching strategies, and most importantly, how the platforms can help you enhance students’ 4C skills.
Let's get started.
Kahoot!
Kahoot, released in 2013, is a platform for game-based learning and trivia that is widely used in schools and other educational contexts. It is a free, cloud-based solution.
You may use Kahoot! to generate interesting quizzes for student evaluation, give homework, challenge students, create surveys and polls, and even play live Kahoots.
It is regarded as a very entertaining program and popular among both teachers and students because it makes learning fun and engaging.
While it's a terrific tool for supporting teachers, Kahoot has a few flaws, which is why we've created a free Kahoot alternative, with better features to support your students’ 4C’s learning. Although Rolljak and Kahoot are similar, Rolljak has a number of advantages that set it apart.
Rolljak
Rolljak is more than just a live quiz tool; it's an all-in-one teaching platform that's jam-packed with interactive features.
Unlike Kahoot and other similar apps, Rolljak assists you in translating ideas in a dynamic and interesting way. With Rolljak, teachers can create a complete and interactive session by asking open-ended questions to which students can react via text or diagrammatic responses. By enabling Collaboration, Peer Evaluation, and even Team Mode on the session, students are not only responding to the prompted questions but also encouraged to collaborate.
In other words, Rolljak promotes creativity and teamwork among students.
Rolljak vs Kahoot
You should have a good grasp of what Kahoot and Rolljak are capable of.
Both platforms enable users to develop and take quizzes in a more entertaining and engaging manner. They do, however, have distinguishing characteristics that set them apart from one another.
That is why we will go right into their comparisons.
The most significant disadvantages noted in terms of Kahoot downsides are.....
- Limited question types
- Limited polling options
- Limited customization options
- Doesn’t support open discussions
- Doesn’t support collaboration
- Confusing dashboard and interface
Furthermore, the great majority of its best features are locked behind a paywall, and its puzzling pricing schemes are significant barriers to entry for new users.
If you’re looking for something like Kahoot without the limitations above, and want to encourage collaboration and creativity in your classrooms, Rolljak is the best choice for you!
Keep on reading.
Ease of Use
The Dashboard
As a new user on Kahoot, I’m pretty sure that you will be stunned when you first log in. The dashboard is a confusing mess. Literally. It’s too wordy and makes you tired before you even begin! The thing you want to do as a teacher once you log in is create a session as quickly and simply as possible. That’s it.
In Rolljak, you will find a clean, tidy, and bright dashboard. It is simple and intuitive! You will find recommended sessions based on your profile. Even if you feel confused and need help, you can simply click Start Exploring at the left bottom of the screen. There, you can try the playtest as a user, and see how a session run.
Creating a Session
To create a session in Kahoot, you can choose one of the templates or create your own session from scratch. But as a free user, you can just use two types of questions: Quiz (multiple choice questions) and True or False.
In Rolljak, you can try the Recommended Sessions, or you can choose from a variety of question types to create your session: Open Ended, Sketch It Out, Multiple Choice Questions, or Auto Scoring Quiz. You can also use and customize a selection of preset activities in the Activity Library to suit your objectives.
On Kahoot session builder, you will find a 3-panel interface that looks like Google Slides.
- On the left of the screen, there’s quiz or slide timeline in the column view. You can change the order of questions or slides here.
- In the middle of the screen, there’s quiz editor where you put your question and answers
- On the right of the screen, it’s editing panel where you can change the question type. For a free user, you just can have Quiz and True or False.
Meanwhile, this is the session builder on Rolljak
- On the left of the screen, there’s an activity timeline in the column view. You can change the order of activities here.
- In the middle of the screen, there’s participant and facilitator preview. It gives you a preview of how students will see on their device when the game is live.
- On the left of the screen, there’s Activity Builder where you input your question and decide the number of responses your students can provide. Turn on Collaboration and Peer Evaluation, and customize the time allocated to each phase of activity.
You can add more activities to your session by clicking “Add Activity” on the top left of your screen.
Unique Feature Comparison
Kahoot
Mobile App: Kahoot has a mobile app that allows you to design games on the fly. You may also host a Kahoot game from your mobile device.
Ghost Mode: When you enable ghost mode, students can play again and again, the platform shows students’ previous tries as ghosts. This allows you to easily compare earlier attempts with current ones to see how far students have come.
Friendly Nickname Generator: If you've ever fought inappropriate nicknames while running a Kahoot! game, you'll recognize that the generator allows you to choose from three different nicknames.
Types of activities: Users on Kahoot's free plan can only utilize two types of slides: a 'Quiz' slide (multiple choice) and a 'True or False' slide (a more limited multiple choice).
Rolljak
Open Ended and Sketch it out: Create a sequence of activities in which you ask students to answer an open-ended question—compose a poem, sketch their thoughts, or calculate a formula; the choice is yours! For the Sketch It activity, you can even upload a background image so students don’t start with the blank canvas. You may explore pre-made activities and customize them, or design your own from start using Rolljak various response types.
Auto Scoring Quiz: Save your time for what matters the most for students learning experience. With Auto Scoring Quiz, you can put the model answer of your open-ended question and let Rolljak score your students' answers. See the result immediately after students submitted the answers, so you can focus on giving them valuable feedback!
Collaboration: Collaboration is one of the most essential skills that can be taught in the classroom, and that many ed-tech platforms do not allow for it. Rolljak allows students to swap each other responses to improve on the ideas of others. As a teacher, you can see ideas develop and come to life. When Team Mode is enabled, students will exchange their responses with peers within a team.
Peer Review: Promote critical thinking by allowing students to evaluate one another's work. Peer review may occur in a variety of ways, depending on whether you want them to scale, invest, or tag.
Game Variety
Kahoot! and Rolljak both provide in-game development tools. They both allow teachers to build their own quizzes.
What distinguishes the two is that as a free user, teachers can only use Kahoot! to construct multiple-choice and true or false quizzes.
Meanwhile for Rolljak, teachers can create not only multiple-choice quizzes, but also open ended and sketch based games.
Student Experiences
Both Kahoot! and Rolljak employ fun music and colorful colors to make the learning environment more lively and game-like.
With Kahoot, students’ smartphones will just display the symbol and color options. You must utilize the classroom screen to see the actual answers.
With Rolljak, students can participate using any smart device. While they wait for the game to start, they can show their creativity by designing their avatars.
Enabling collaboration on Rolljak allows your students to exchange responses and build on the ideas of their classmates while being completely anonymous—allowing all students to freely share their perspectives!
If you enable Peer Evaluation on Rolljak, you can show your students the winners podium with the top 3 ideas. In this phase, you can let your students discuss what makes those ideas gain the highest investments or scores, and what they can do to improve their responses.
Reports
Both Kahoot! and Rolljak are unable to detect and measure student development. With LMS integration, you can store and track students' performance and spot what should be improved.
Kahoot! learning games generate real-time data, which you can download and view in Excel as a teacher. Rolljak also populates on-the-spot responses, which you can see in the Gallery and access whenever you need.
You can also find the Reports button on the top right beside your profile. Make your experience using Rolljak become more measurable using Reports!
Session Summary
Now you can easily check your audience engagement and accuracy rate in the Session Summary. Get full insight into who is the most engaged, least engaged, and identify particular participants who need help.
Insight and Analysis
Reports allow you to be more data-driven, you can gauge participants’ engagement level and quiz accuracy rate across the Activity, Participation, and Team level.
Pricing
Kahoot's pricing ranges from free to $720 a year, with 16 distinct non-enterprise options that provide you as a host an increasing level of freedom. Every plan, with the exception of its 'Free' and 'Standard' plans, is only accessible on a year-long subscription, which means you must be quite certain about your selection before signing up.
Rolljak offers only 3 types of Subscription Plans: Free Forever, Pro Plan, Premium Plan, Enterprise Plan, and even a one-time used package. You can signup now as and enjoy a 14-days free trial of the Pro Plan.
What are our users saying?
“It takes collaboration and interaction to a new level” —Bruria, Language teacher
“I think it's better than Kahoot!” —Kua Jing Han, Science teacher
“Can motivate students” —Rosmainey, Science teacher
“It’s not really a competitor of quizziz or anything because it’s quite unique” —Alwin, Math teacher
“I have presented on how I have used it for class at several workshops/invited talks. I described it as an online collaborative ideation tool. I use it as a case study of how gamification can be applied.” —Bina, Design and Engineering teacher
Rolljak vs Kahoot: Which is better?
Kahoot! and other similar platforms allow you to create more interactive quizzes digitally. They will help you a lot in your formative assessments and can boost engagement in your classrooms.
But Rolljak aims for something more.
Yes, you can use Rolljak to improve students’ engagement by creating fun quizzes with the Multiple Choice Questions feature. However, Rolljak is built to embody the 4C’s of 21st Century skills, both in virtual and physical classrooms
If you are a teacher who wants to incorporate thoughtful learning in your classrooms, Rolljak is the best platform for you and your students!
Conclusion
Any ed-tech that is worthy of consideration should first clearly indicate how it will benefit student learning: What will your students be able to do using ABC? How would incorporating XYZ into the classroom enrich your students' learning experience? It is the educators who determine how they want to incorporate the 4C's into daily lesson planning.
Here in Rolljak, we truly understand what teachers and students need in this era. After all, we do hope that we’re all in it for the same reason—the student success.
To try Rolljak for free, simply click the icon below. There are thousands of teachers eager to greet you!