Welcome to the New Knoword
I'm so excited to announce this latest update to Knoword. It has been a long time in the making, and it comes at a historic moment.
This fall, teachers and students will return to an unfamiliar classroom environment with unprecedented challenges. To help teachers engage with their students, we've been laser-focused on making Knoword a tool that's trusted by teachers, and a game that's loved by students. As distance learning becomes increasingly popular, we think teaching tools like Knoword will play an essential role in every educator's toolkit.
So, without further ado, let's take a look at some of the new features that make teachers' lives easier this fall.
Introducing: Knoword Assignments
Over the last year, we've been in absolute awe of how many teachers have used Knoword to create vocabulary exercises for their students. Teachers from all over the world have been creating custom word packs and using our "classes" feature to see their students' responses, as they play through the word packs. This was a handy feature, but classes had some drawbacks:
- 👎 Teachers could only see results for games played using their own packs.
- 👎 Students were required to create an account and manually be added to a class by their teacher.
To overcome these drawbacks, we created Knoword Assignments.
With Assignments, teachers can easily plan, assign, and track the responses of their students.
When planning an assignment, teachers can choose from the thousands of community-generated packs, or they can create their own. Teachers can set due dates and time limits on assignments, which helps enforce deadlines and facilitate time-boxed class activities.
Students no longer need to login or create an account to complete an assignment. If they don't have an account, they can simply enter their name before completing an assignment—just like they would before they hand-in a worksheet in class.
After a student has completed an assignment, the teacher can see their responses and check their score, which makes Knoword Assignments effortless to grade and easy to determine when your students are struggling.
Last but not least, Knoword Assignments can be posted to Google Classroom with the push of a button, which makes it super easy for students to find and complete their assignments. All of the details about your assignment, including the due date and notes, will automatically show up inside Google Classroom.
To recap:
- 👍 Teachers can assign and see results for any pack, whether they created it or not.
- 👍 Students no longer need to create an account to complete their assignments.
- 👍 Fine-grained control over assignment settings
- 👍 Solid integration with Google Classroom
We're only scratching the surface of what can be done using Knoword Assignments. To learn more, check out our reference guide, or dive in to assignments today.
Pack it up, pack it in
Let me begin by expressing how amazing it is to see the creativity displayed by pack creators in the Knoword community. There are now thousands of word packs, ranging from vocabulary quizzes to anime trivia to protein synthesis, and everything in between. 🤯
Today we're making the packs experience better in many ways:
- Filter by "Popular", "New", and "Most played" packs
- "Star" packs ⭐ to save them for future reference
- Select a custom time limit (or none) before starting a pack game
- Improved pack editor interface
- Free pack limit increased to 5
With these changes in place, we're excited to see how the community uses word packs in the future. For more information about packs, check out its section in our reference guide.
Final words
We live in an unprecedented but exciting time; when teachers and students embark on a new educational journey. We hope we can be a part of your journey by building great tools and games that teachers and students love alike. If you have any questions about the changes discussed in this post, send us a message, we'd love to hear from you.
—Trevor from Knoword