I first came across Quizziz when my group and I were planning our presentation. We had originally planned to begin the presentation with some sort of pre-test, and wanted to use something other than Kahoot. Disclaimer: Kahoot is a fantastic tool, but we wanted to be able to showcase something that everyone hadn’t seen before. I did a Google search for “tools like Kahoot”, and came up with Quizziz. As shown in the screenshot above, the tagline for Quizziz is to “Get Your Students Excited About Learning”, and in my experience with it, it is true- my students LOVED Quizziz.

In terms of technology, we are not a real wealthy school. We have 2 desktop computer labs (which are booked 3/5 periods a day) and a class set of Chromebooks in a charge cart. Despite years of request, we don’t have any iPads. We also have a fairly “old-school” staff who are more likely to put a school-wide ban on cell phones than to allow BYOD. So our students don’t have a lot of exposure to tech in the classroom, and any/most/all is Web 1.0. My students loved Quizziz, but maybe those who have more experience with technology in the classroom wouldn’t.

When you go to the Quizziz main page, you have 4 basic options: Get Started, Help, Log In, or Join a Game. If you want to try it for the first time and create your own quiz, you will need to “Get Started” by creating a free account with a user name and password. If you just want to see what it’s about, you can browse quizzes that already exist without an account. Once you have an account, you are set up to create quizzes. One downside is that, similar to Kahoot, you can only ask multiple choice and true or false type questions. You can have up to four possible answers. You can include an image with your question, which I found helpful. One thing I wish I would’ve known when I created my first quiz was that you can actually search for questions that already exist and add them to your own quiz. For a common topic like Ecosystems, this was a huge time saver. I made my first quiz as a comprehension check for a folk-tale we had read in ELA 8, and they went wild! They absolutely loved it, and asked if we could do it every day.

A couple of negatives: similar to Kahoot, there is a scoreboard, so there were some kids who got discouraged (but most of it was healthy competition) and kids who are slower readers are definitely disadvantaged. Another challenge is that if students choose an obscure nickname, it is hard to make use of the data. I learned this the hard way, and eventually I told them to use their real first name. The students loved the random avatars and the memes that appear between each question. It is interesting, because what is on the teacher’s screen is not the same as what is on the student’s screen. The teacher’s screen displays a running tally of correct and incorrect answers, while the student’s screens show the question they are answering. Another nice feature is that the questions are scrambled, so even if students are sitting close to one another, they aren’t answering the same question. In addition, you can set the time length for each question, so the possibility to include some higher level questions is there. Probably my favorite feature of Quizziz is the ability to create reports. Once the game is done, results are exported to MS Excel and displayed in a way that is neat, organized, and easy to read. On the spreadsheet, you can see areas students are strong in, and areas they need to improve upon, as well as accuracy %.

Quizziz can be used for formative and summative assessment. I assigned it as homework (an option on the site) for my Science 7 class, and they used it to study for an upcoming test. I didn’t assign a mark to it, but they could use it to see the areas they need to improve upon. In ELA, I used it as a summative assessment for a read aloud novel, and have also used it as a summative assessment in Science.

In my limited experience, I have found Quizziz to be a really useful tool, and would highly recommend it.

If you have experience or suggestions from your own experience, please share! If you are willing to give Quizziz a try, please let me know how you make out.