Worse than the Holocaust?

Pro: If you set up a personal account, you can keep all your material when you change teaching jobs.<br><br> Cons: Nine years ago my students were complaining about how old-fashioned it looked. It hasn't changed one bit in all that time.<br> The price listed on commonsense.org isn't up-to-date. It's doubling to $100 for the '20-'21 school year.<br> When I made suggestions to Quia for how to improve (just simply to make the gradebook more manageable by freezing student names on the left and alternating row colors), I was told they're not making ANY improvements.<br> Other sites' LaTeX are much easier and better looking.<br> Google Classroom provides surveys for free.<br> It lacks features of modern quiz-making sites: randomization of answer order, easy and aesthetic LaTeX, timed quizzes, student-pleasing visuals.<br> When the gradebook and roster of one of my classes vanished, they spent days fiddling around before passing it off to their "engineers." Then I was told they couldn't find what had happened after two days. So they burned up the two days on their end, and told me I was out of luck. Sites that maintain gradebooks can't have gradebooks vanish. This is the biggest reason I simply can't continue with Quia, despite all the quizzes I've built up on the site. I'll just have to go through every one, saving it as a PDF, and recreating it on another site.<br> If you want to know where to look for alternatives to Quia, type in "exam software" on Google or here: https://www.capterra.com/exam-software/ <br><br> So tech support is weak. So the grading on the left for "Support" is not based on Quia's support of teachers. The question commonsense asked was "A re there supports for different kinds of learners." Entirely different question.

Overall, I feel this is a useful tool to help students learn in a fun way.

QUIA is useful for all levels of students - advanced learners can challenge themselves, while low literacy students can focus on repetition/flash cards and word find games to reinforce vocabulary. It's easy to navigate, students can find not only my activities but also search for similar ones made by other teachers (i.e. AR verbs, subjunctive, food vocabulary). One thing I must admit is that it takes a LONG time setting up the quizzes and activities. I spend a good 2 hours a week creating quiz banks and activities, but once they are created, they are there forever, just like my SMART board lessons. As part of my "flipped classroom" initiative, one of the things I've tried to do is get review lessons and assessments out of the classroom. While you can't post videos to QUIA, you can create review questions - in any format - as well as activities and quizzes. What I do is create a video lesson on something they SHOULD know (for example, reflexive verbs), and then they have one week to do the activities and practices on QUIA before taking the summative quiz. If they have questions or trouble, as long as they are logged into the system, I have access to their activity and can see exactly where they are making mistakes, so I can help them quickly and individually. Quizzes can be randomly generated through a mass question bank (which you create), so each student gets a unique quiz and the requisite "cheating" is kept to a minimum. Students can use the site by simply searching for your name, or you can create a class list for them, with their own unique user name and password (I change theirs to "Spanish" to make it easy). Again, it's time consuming entering 130+ names into the system, but if I do one or two classes a day, it isn't bad. While it does cost money for an annual license, I am fortunate in that my school has purchased licenses for us for the past several years. Don't be fooled by the non-flashy setup of the website. When you realize just how much QUIA has to offer you (even a gradebook, if you want to go that route), you will want to use it more and more. Baby steps, though....it can be overwhelming!