Another useful website for TESOL teachers is Blooket (https://www.blooket.com/).  This website is useful for creating games to review vocabulary sets.

Blooket is like Kahoot and other websites in the sense that this is another game in which the teacher logs into the website, launches the game from their computer, gives the class a game code, and then the class goes to the join game address (https://play.blooket.com/play) and joins the game from the smart phone or other device.  In other words, this is yet another website which requires all the students to have their own devices.  (Which, of course, is nowadays not an issue in many contexts.)

I first discovered Blooket while teaching online during the Covid lockdown period.  I was covering a class for another teacher (online) and I asked the class what games they liked to do, and they answered "Blooket".  I had never heard of that game before, but the teaching assistant for that class guided me on how to go to the website and conduct that game.

I've since then introduced a number of my colleagues to Blooket, and it's taken over our school by storm.  All the teachers and students love it.

I've been describing Blooket to my colleagues as "a much more gamified version of Kahoot" or "like Kahoot, but with a lot more bells and whistles".

The bad news is that you need to create an account and log into Blooket before you can see or do anything.  I don't think you can even see the games that other teachers have created without creating an account first.  (It is possible to share links to Blooket games that you've created, but that other teacher will have to create an account before they can access it.)

The good news is that it's very easy to create an account with Blooket.  In fact, Blooket just let's you login through your Google Account, so that's what I've been doing for the past year and a half.

And the really good news is that Blooket has made it very easy to import your quizzes from quizlet into Blooket.  

If you login into Blooket, they even have step by step instructions on how to import your quizlet quizzes into Blooket.  

So if you're like me, and you already have tons of materials already created for quizlet, then it's super easy to just transfer them over to Blooket.  (Once you learn how to do it, then it takes like 2 minutes to transfer a quizlet set over to Blooket.)  I'm not sure how the people at quizlet feel about this little feature, but it works great for Blooket.

Then, once you launch the quiz, there's several game modes to choose from (I usually let the students choose), then the game code is created, the students join, and the game starts.

The teacher can decide the length of the game time before starting, but the recommended time for most games is 7 minutes, and I usually go with that.  (When you start a game, you have a choice of selecting rather the game ends after a certain amount of time, or after a certain amount of points. When I first started using Blooket, I made the mistake of selecting that the game would end after a certain amount of points.  The teaching assistant tried to warn me that this would make the game go on for far too long, and he was right.  It's usually best to just select the 7 minute time limit.)

Unlike Kahoot, once the game starts, the teacher can't actually see the questions from their end.  The teacher's screen only displays the point totals.  But the teacher can't actually see what questions the students are answering.  So, unlike Kahoot, I can't really comment on the questions or explain things when students get the questions  wrong.  I just sit at the front and do nothing.  (There are a couple game modes which are an exception to this--classic, and battle royale--which operate more like the Kahoot model.)

For this reason, I never use Blooket to introduce new vocabulary.  It's only used to consolidate vocabulary sets we've already studied. (e.g. review all the vocabulary from the previous unit, etc.)

There are days when I feel a bit funny standing up at the front of the class with nothing to do for 7 minutes while students play Blooket.  But there are also days when I quite like it--say, on a Monday morning, when Blooket gives me 7 minutes to quietly drink my coffee while the students play the game.

There is an ongoing debate in my staffroom about how useful games like Kahoot, quizlet, Blooket, etc are for language learning.

I myself have made a lot of use of quizlet over the years in my own language study--both to learn Vietnamese and to study TESOL terminology.  I've found that quizlet is very useful for helping me to memorize certain terminology--for example, words that have a simple definition, or a one-to-one correspondence with the L1.  For example, "dog" is "cho" in Vietnamese, "cat" is "meo" in Vietnamese, etc.  Those kind of simple definitions are very useful on quizlet.

Longer definitions or more abstract words don't work as well, however, because after a certain point my brain doesn't really pay attention to the meaning of the definition, it just looks for other clues.  For example: "This is the definition that's really long, so it's this word" or "this is the definition that's really short, so it's this word" or "this is the definition that's got a blank in the middle, so it's this word", etc.

I think all of this applies to Blooket as well.  (My Blooket sets are, after all, simply imported from my quizlet sets.)  Blooket/Quizlet can be potentially very useful for memorizing words with simple definitions, but less useful for longer definitions.

But I do have to confess, these days I just primarily use Blooket to help me manage late students.

Blooket is a 7 minute game that students can join in on at any point during the game.  So if a student walks into class late, they can just see the game code and join the game without disrupting the class.

(There are a couple game modes which do not allow late joiners--Blookrush, Battle Royale--but most of the game modes allow students to join at any time.)

The game code is displayed on the computer screen throughout the entire game, so if you're using a projector for your computer screen, students can already see it.  But just to make it super obvious, I always write the game code in really big numbers on the white board.  So as students come in late, I just point them to the game code on the white board.

In my context, in the 8:00 am class I usually have very few students on time, so I just run the Blooket for the first 7 minutes to allow students to trickle in late without disturbing the class.