Brunswick replaced 20-minute videos and a sign-off form with shorter, more engaging Kahoot! courses. The result: 98% of its 500 employees, from bus drivers to teachers to district leaders, completed their mandatory training in about half the time.
Brunswick School Department also uses Kahoot! EDU in its classrooms, from elementary to high school. Read the full story here
About Brunswick School Department: Brunswick School Department is a K-12 public school district in Brunswick, Maine, serving 2400 students across its 4 schools, including Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School, Brunswick Junior High School, and Brunswick High School. The district has about 500 employees.
Tricia has worked in Brunswick for seven years. She manages the district’s edtech tools and connects teachers and staff with the companies that make them.
Every year, all of Brunswick’s roughly 500 employees complete about 10 mandatory trainings. That includes teachers and educational technicians, as well as custodians, bus drivers, food service workers, the tech department, and central office staff. Topics include respectful interactions with students and colleagues, gender equity, workplace conduct, and supporting students experiencing homelessness.
For district leadership, these trainings carry weight for two reasons. Staff need to know the laws that shape their daily work in schools, and the district needs proof that every employee was trained, in case a situation is ever questioned.
The old process couldn’t deliver proof. Staff watched a long video produced by lawyers, then ticked a box on a Google Form to say they had finished. Completion was hard to track, and comprehension wasn’t measured.
“There wasn’t a lot of accountability per se, it was just trust that you did it. The videos were very long, so you start to question whether people were really watching everything they needed to. Were they getting the information?”.
The goal was simple: make training shorter and more interactive, and give time back to staff. With support from Kahoot!, they designed a way to rebuild each training as a Kahoot! Course. A technology integrator at Brunswick Junior High School, Michelle Russo, built them. Michelle took the transcript of each 20-minute video and turned it into a Kahoot! story that takes about five minutes to read.
Each course follows the same pattern:
Everyone works at their own pace, with about six weeks to finish all 10 courses.
Rebuilding 10 trainings was a big job. Michelle used the Kahoot! Assistant to draft both the stories and the questions.
“Taking those transcripts from the videos and then putting them into the AI assistant to generate a story really saved me a lot of time. And then I was able to proofread the stories to make sure that they hit on the main points that we needed”.
In the first year with the new format, about 98% of staff completed their mandatory training. This far exceeded completion levels from previous years.
For Tricia, the shift goes beyond compliance. The courses have become genuine professional development: a regular refresher on the laws every school employee needs to follow.
To meet Brunswick’s staff training needs, Kahoot! brought features from their workplace platform into Kahoot! EDU to support the district’s needs. And when questions came up right before launch, the team responded the same day.
“We were getting down to having to launch our mandatory training. We were having some issues. So I reached out to Kahoot! in the morning, and I said, we really need to meet with you. At one o’clock, we jumped on a call. And that response from a company is just amazing”.
Brunswick also uses Kahoot! EDU in classrooms from elementary through high school. Read the classroom engagement story here.
That matters for district leaders weighing their tech stack. The platform teachers already know for student learning now also delivers self-paced micro-learning to custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria staff, and administrators. Leadership gets clear data on completions and pass rates. Staff get a training experience they actually like.
Brunswick’s approach can be adapted by any district with recurring compliance training:
Want to make mandatory training faster to complete and easier to track in your district? Email us at getedu@kahoot.com or explore what you can do with Kahoot! EDU.
Do you have a Kahoot! success story you’d like to share? Reach out to us via LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, or send us an email at press@kahoot.com.
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