And yet another useful website for TESOL teachers is Gimkit (https://www.gimkit.com/).  This website is useful for creating games to review vocabulary sets.

In a previous post, I talked about how I had discovered the website Blooket, and then I had spread Blooket among the other teachers at my school.  

While, about a year ago, I started hearing some of my colleagues talk about a new website called "Gimkit".  Which they described as "exactly like Blooket, but much, much better."

I previously described Blooket as "just like Kahoot, but with more bells and whistles".  Well, Gimkit can safely be described as "just like Blooket, but with more bells and whistles."  (I guess this is how the world of computer apps works, huh?  Everyone is constantly trying to create an app that's better than the previous app.)

Gimkit is indeed very impressive, and some of its games are arguably better than Blooket.  (The Gimkit games are definitely more complex and involved than the Blooket games.)

The problem, though, is Gimkit really wants your money.

On Blooket, all the important features are completely free.

Gimkit only has a couple free games, and all the good stuff is behind the paywall.

And I suppose I speak for most impoverished TESOL teachers when I say that I'm not going to pay for classroom games out of my own pocket.

Nevertheless, there are a couple games on Gimkit that you can play for free, and I've been getting good use out of these free games.

The games that are freely available appear to change over time.  (Last year, "Capture the Flag" and "Snowbrawl" were free, and I got a lot of good use out of both of those games.  Now, those games are for paid subscribers only, so I've had to switch to other free games.)

A few of my colleagues have been able to get access to the premium games by signing up for free trials, but I could never get my free trial to work for some reason.  (This appears to be just some sort of glitch on my account.  Or who knows, maybe I was doing something wrong)  

I even had one colleague who claimed to just keep signing up for free trial after free trial, and claimed to be able to exploit the system that way for unlimited access to the premium games.

But all of this was last year.  I'm not even sure the free trials are still a thing at Gimkit anymore.

The functionality of Gimkit is pretty much exactly the same as Blooket.  Gimkit is better, but the general idea is exactly the same.  So I'm not going to repeat everything I said for Blooket.  Just see my previous post on Blooket.  (And, just like on Blooket, Gimkit allows you to import quizzes from Quizlet, so that's great for me.)

To sum up: even though all the best stuff is behind the paywall, there's still a few good games on Gimkit that you can do for free, so I do still use it occasionally in my classroom.  I alternate it with Blooket.  When my students are beginning to get sick of the Blooket games near the end of term, I usually switch things up by doing some Gimkit.