Quizizz — Create Student-Paced Gamified Quizzes
This article is a translation of a text first published in the French edition of Profweb.
Quizizz is a free web tool that allows teachers to create multiple-choice questionnaires that students can answer individually at their own pace.
Quizizz promotional video for teachers.
You can’t decide which tool to choose?
There is no lack of tools to create quizzes. In 2017, Profweb posted a series of videos created by future college teachers that present some of these tools. [in French]
I have tested in the classroom:
- Kahoot! – Organize quizzes for class. Fun, easy to use and highly appreciated by the students. A drawback: the number of characters is limited in the questions as well as in the answers. An article on Kahoot! has already been published in Profweb.
- Plickers – Students do not need a digital device to answer multiple-choice questions (only the teacher uses a smartphone or tablet). A well-designed tool, but not as easy to use as Kahoot! and not as fun. I liked it, but stopped using it when I realised that all of my students (without exception) had a telephone, a tablet or a computer with them.
- Mentimeter – Also for asking multiple-choice questions that are integrated into a presentation created with Mentimeter. I liked this tool less than the previous 2, because the free version offers only a limited number of types of “quiz” questions that you can ask (i.e. multiple-choice questions for which one or more of the answers are correct and the others are wrong). As well, there is no real competition between the students (the scores aren’t compared).
Today, I would like to present a tool that seems as much fun as my favourite (Kahoot!), but meets a different need.
Quizizz in detail
Whereas Kahoot! was designed so that teachers could present the questions on a screen at the front of the class and so that all of the students could answer at the same time (as fast as possible!), Quizizz was created so that students can answer questions at their own pace.
It is possible to encourage students to answer rapidly by choosing a setting that gives students more points for faster answers. (You decide how much time is allocated.)
Because you are no longer controlling when the questions appear on the screen, students can answer questions at home as well as in class.
It remains competitive because students can compare their score to their peers’ if the teacher toggled that setting.
Bonus: you can choose to have memes appear. They will be different depending on whether the student gave a correct or incorrect answer.
A video capture [in French] of my answers to the first few questions to a quiz that I picked randomly from a bank of public quizzes. This quiz was created by a teacher from the Réunion Island. Try it! [in French] (When you create a quiz, you can decide to make it private or public.)
I haven’t tested Quizizz with students, but the tool seems fun and user-friendly. (And, in case of a problem, the pages of the Help Center are extensive.) Have you ever tried Quizizz? What did you think of it?
