Note from Matthew at ELA in Middle School
This post was written by Sarah Renish, Teacher and Teacher-Author Entrepreneur. Sarah is the owner of Ratelis Science, which has a storefront on BOOM!Learning (SM), Amped Up Learning and TpT. Sarah is no stranger to our regular readers, as she authored the posts "Adding BOOM! Cards (TM) to Your Toolbox" and "Using Edpuzzles".
Sarah's Biography
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| Sarah Renish |
I am a 6-12 science teacher in Wisconsin that has over 20 years of teaching experience working with students from diverse backgrounds, including at-risk, ELL, SPED, and Gifted & Talented students. I am actively involved in developing and teaching professional development opportunities related to science instructional best practices. In addition to my regular work for district curriculum committees and numerous professional development sessions, I have taught for the past 18 years in Kenosha Unified School District.
Part of the work I do at my school includes duties as a vertical team leader for all ten science teachers in the 6th through 8th grades, facilitating our professional learning community, and coordinating with my building and district administration to improve science instruction. As a part of these duties, I do research on instructional best practices and develop short professional development sessions for our staff. I also work with my grade level team of science teachers and special education teachers to develop common assessments and to make appropriate accommodations for students. I am also a formal and informal mentor to a number of teachers, both in my content and in other subjects as well.
Quizizz for Assessments and More!
Looking for a way to give formative assessments or have students review before a test? I have found that Quizizz has become one of my go to teaching tools. This is a free site that allows you to build, modify, and use quizzes created by the users. Quizizz can be played in a game style format, or as a more restricted quiz format, giving you flexibility in how you can use it in your classes.
For me, I am always looking for ways to get data about my students' understandings and areas of confusion in an efficient manner. I love that Quizizz is self-grading and creates an easy to use reporting system. I can filter by question accuracy and look to see which questions my students missed the most. I often use these questions to create a mini lesson the next day, or I intentionally put them into my warm-ups to make time to review them as a class before moving on. We work towards mastery in my classes, so I am always looking for activities that I can use with repetition. Another positive for me is that students can redo the work as often as they want until they reach mastery.
The quizzes give my students feedback about correct scores and have the option of also including a funny Meme that changes depending on if they correctly or incorrectly answered the question. To make it more game-like, I can offer power-up options for students to use like a redemption question where they can retry a missed question to improve their scores. I especially like that I can set up the Quizizz to connect with my Google Classroom, and it automatically updates student scores for accountability.
Quizizz allows you to conduct student-paced formative assessments in a fun and engaging way for students of all ages. The most important features are: first, the games are self-paced, with the questions appearing on each student's screen, so they can answer questions at their own pace, and review their answers at the end. Second, it can be played by students using any kind of device with a browser, including PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Third, you can build your own quizzes or select and modify quizzes already created by other users, This gives you access to a very large selection of questions when planning the game. The types of questions you can ask are also not limited to a single multiple-choice answer; you can have students select more than one answer and do short fill in the blanks that the program can auto-check.
Ready to set up a Quizizz account?
Quizizz can be played on any device with a browser, and there is a free student Quizizz app. To build and create a quiz does require a desktop or laptop.
Do I need an account?
It depends. You can search and play any public Quizizz without an account, but you need an account to create you own Quizizz and to have student data reports stored to your account. You can click here to set up your own account for free.
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| Quizizz Welcomes You |
After you have set up your account, you'll see your welcome page. You can search for topics or check out the recommendations for you based on previous quizzes you have used. You will also see on the left side of your screen your teacher menu that lists all of the things you can do with your Quizizz account.
"Find a Quiz" is how you can search the public collection of already created quizzes.
"My Quizzes" contains all of the quizzes you personally have created. It also contains "Collections", which are folders used to organize quizzes.
"Create" takes you to the Quiz Editor so that you can create your own quizzes.
"Reports" includes results fro all the games you have run or hosted.
You can even create custom Memes for your games that are shown to students after correct or incorrect answers!
Setting Up To Play a Game
Pick the quiz you want to assign and set up the game play.
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| Setting up the Quizizz Game |
There are different settings that you can control before starting a quiz. You can see the settings menu after selecting your preferred game type, Live or Homework, on the quiz page. All of your game settings are housed under Advanced Settings. They are further divided into General Settings and Game-play Settings.
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| Game-play Settings |
The ones that I use the most are:
- Student Attempts: This setting lets you control the number of attempts made by students in a quiz. However, enabling this setting would require students to log into their Quizizz account to attempt the quiz.
- Show answers in-game: This setting controls the feedback the students see right after answering a question. You can toggle whether they get immediate feedback on getting an answer correct/incorrect, and also whether or not to show them all of the questions with their correct answers at the end of the quiz.
- Show answers post-game: This setting controls the display of the review section for the students at the end of the game. Turn this ON to allow you students to review the questions and correct their answers. Select Questions Only to allow your students to see only the question and option choices without highlighting the correct answer. If this is turned OFF, students will not be able to review the questions or answers after the quiz.
Teachers can use the "Review Mode" to discuss questions with their students from the class once they have completed the assigned quiz. Review mode can be accessed on the reports page after hosting a Live or Homework quiz. Click here to know more about hosting a quiz on Quizizz. After assigning a quiz to your students, go to the Reports tab and select a report to find the "Review Mode" button.
Personally, I really like that Quizizz can be linked to my Google Classroom. I can assign it to students in Google Classroom, and it will update student scores after they finish a quiz!
While we do use the live version in my classroom, I have found success using Quizizz assigned as homework, as well as part of a station rotation for students. It is something they can setup on their own, the game gives them immediate feedback, and I can see student progress in the teacher reports for accountability. I also like that I can set the quiz to allow multiple attempts, so we have a policy that you to work on the Quizizz until your score is at least an 85%, or when you've done all four retakes. Rarely does a student need all four retakes, and giving students the ability to monitor their learning is also very empowering for them!
Using Quizizz as Data Points to Inform Instruction
As a teacher, I'm always looking for way to reduce my grading so that I can spend more time on using that information to guide my lesson plans. Personally, I find the reports from Quizizz to be a quick way for me to get formative assessments of what my students know and do not know. I often use Quizizz as reviews several times in a unit, and assign it once again before the end of unit assessment.
This is a screen shot from an assessment I assigned to my class after an online lesson about states of matter:
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| Data at a glance.. |
I can see that in general, my students have mastered the background content related to models of states of matter, so I can move on to other topics with them. Based on this data, I can also see that I will need to review for my students in my next lesson about how volume changes for solids, liquids and gasses when put into different containers. I also know that I have saved a lot of time not having to hand score and compile this data!
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| The data informs where I need to focus review. |
Why do I love Quizizz? I can use it both synchronously and asynchronously. It can be assigned as a independent homework assignment, or it can be done as a part of an in-class task. Review becomes a self-paced game. It summarizes the data in an easy way to use visually to help me guide my instructional planning. And, finally, it is FREE! How great is that?
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