Another Great Alternative for Formative Assessments and Getting Information on Adjusting Instruction
Community Review for Quizalize
My Take
Overall, I'd encourage teachers to mix up the tools they use to help students review lower-level information and this should certainly be in your "toolbelt!" I like the interface, the reporting options, and the ability to assign as homework. I did experience a little confusion as the URL for the product changed from quizalize.com to live.zzish.com when I was looking for results. I still don't have a complete understanding of the relationship of the two URLs, but I believe the data analytics are being accessed from a different web-based tool and that's what is behind it? It could be better for teachers if that wasn't the case since it was a bit confusing.
The only other negative I came away with when using this tool was that here is another web-based tool that is pretty engaging, but tends to encourage teachers to focus on lower-level depths of knowledge. If your students enjoy this type of tool/activity, I would just challenge you to be sure you're finding ways to make your questions challenging or only use this type of activity occasionally and still push your students to a deeper learning in other ways!
How I Use It
Quizalize is a tool similar to other online quizzing platforms. It works on any web-connected device without an app or software installation (which is nice). The teacher must create a class and create a quiz to assign. There is a "marketplace" which is a library of existing quizzes you can start from (some are free, some are not). Or creating your own quiz is pretty simple, too. When assigning the quiz to a class, you have the option of assigning it to play live or to play as homework. I'm looking forward to using quizzes as homework, because the reporting features for this platform let you see every time a student completed the quiz and how they scored. Opening a review quiz up for an extended time to allow students to practice as many times as they want to prepare for coming assignments would be valuable!
I used it as a lower-level questioning review type activity to make sure students were comfortable with vocabulary necessary for future class discussions and readings. I used it following explicit instruction in class, so students had already been exposed to the content. A nice feature is after the quiz is played, the results include a "what we need help on" summary showing which questions were most frequently answered wrong and by which students. I could quickly see which vocabulary the students had already mastered and I took a few moments to focus on the ones that had several students miss them. Formative assessment and adjusting instruction! Though I didn't take advantage of the feature, you can even break questions into sub-topics and see results broken out by them. Pretty cool!
When I first used this platform with a live class, I wanted to immediately see/show scores after the quiz was done, and it wasn't very intuitive to find where to do that.