Quizzes in a Blended Learning Environment

For the last couple of weeks I have been really exploring the various ways I can use technology to present quizzes. My current purpose is to pre-test the students but I have found that there are some really good formats for a variety of purposes. I thought I would share what I have discovered so far.

I had great fun with Web-based Kahoot today. This is a type of student response system. You need to create an account and then create your quizzes. These are multiple choice and would be fantastic for mental maths, spelling and many other things. The presenter displays the quiz on an IWB or even a screen mirrored from their iPad and students log into Kahootit and use the game pin shown. They read the question and answers on the big screen and the select the corresponding answer on their computer or iPad screen. When all students have answered it shows a leaderboard and is ready for you to move on. Students get a higher score for answering quickly and it shows them if they were correct or incorrect on their scree . Teachers can download the results to excel. The boys loved the competition side of it!

Socrative is an app that is specific to quizzes and feedback. There is a teacher version and a student version and both are free. You can develop multiple choice questions as wells as short answer questions that can include images. This, too, works on iPads or computers and responses can be displayed on the board as they are entered. Socrative quizzes can be student paced, so they move on after each student has answered, or teacher paced. Results can be downloaded.

Quizzes that you can make on Edmodo have a nice range of options for the types of questions you can use such as multiple choice, short answer, fill the blanks, matching the answer. You can also add web links and files.

Blendspace is an excellent tool for blended learning. In the lessons you create you can include a huge range of resources such as YouTube clips, Educreations, photos, we pages, files from Dropbox and a Google Drive and you can add text. The quizzes you can make in Blendspace are just basic multiple choice but excellent to check for understanding. Blendspace is also a free app that is available in Edmodo and once you have assigned the app to your class or to your groups you can create resources and share them through Edmodo.

I will continue to explore tools for creating quizzes and other blended learning resources and hopefully add some more information as I discover it.