OK, so Quizizz has made a ton of updates in the last few months. Time for us to catch up on them!
- First up, they’ve got two new question types rolling out to paid users: dropdown and drag-and-drop. Both are nice because they can be within a passage of text. So any time that you’d add a blank into a passage for them to fill in like cloze reading activities, for example, you can use dropdown or drag-and-drop there. And, speaking of adding a blank, that’s actually how you do it. When you get to the spot that you want a blank, just put two underscores and a rectangle will pop up. Type in the correct answer, then hit enter and you’ll see it highlighted in white AND added to the options below. You can then add additional detractor options, if you want to.
On the student end, it’s pretty straight-forward how it works. The only tricky thing is what to do if they initially drag a drag-and-drop option to the wrong spot. They can’t drag it to a new spot – instead, they click the red X and then drag it to the correct spot. In both of these options, you can have multiple spots to answer… so I wondered, how will it grade it? So, first, in a game the kids get some points, but less than the full amount, if they got some of the answers correct and others incorrect. And this is great – they’re rewarded, but not as much as a kid who got it completely correct. In the summary views, both on the teacher and student screen, it shows them as either correct or incorrect, not partially correct. And, it seems like it shows up one way in one screen and the other way in the other, which is weird. However, in the reports that you can access, which is the most important to me, it’ll break the kids’ score down. It gives them the proportional amount of the points that the question was worth. Which is a good time to remind you – you can modify the number of points a question is worth. They default to 5 points apiece, but if you have a question with 3 blanks, you might want to make it worth 3 points… or a multiple of 3… or maybe even 15 to treat it as 3 5-point questions. I’m excited to see these options available. Again, they’re for paid users only. You may not see them in your account just yet, but they should appear soon.
- This one seems little, but I know it’s one that I’ve wished for before – if you start up a homework assignment and discover that you had a mistake, like a question that had the wrong correct answer selected, you can go back in and make that change without deleting the assignment and recreating it. Previously, all of your students would have that answer marked incorrectly and you’d have to explain the mixup to them later… but now you can make the fix right away, hopefully before most of your students have encountered it. This is available on Quizizz paid plans.
- Students can now also skip questions and come back to them later. When they click the Skip button, that question is moved to the end of the quiz. Then, after they’ve attempted all the other questions, they’ll return to the one that they skipped. Note that when they return to the skipped questions, they won’t have the option to skip them again. This feature is part of the paid plans.
- If you’re using Quizizz to assess your students’ understanding on a topic, you’re going to want to make sure that they’re not looking up answers in other tabs. If you’re on a Quizizz School or District Plan, you can now use Focus Mode within Live Tests to do this. Focus mode will open the Quizizz activity in full screen and warn your student if they try to exit full screen. Also, you’ll be notified if they switch tabs while in the quiz.
- There are multiple notifications that you’ll receive as the teacher. Those notifications will come up if the student leaves the quiz, if they spend 2 minutes outside of the quiz, if they join the quiz 2 minutes late, if they exit before completing the quiz, and, finally, if they rejoin the quiz after 2 minutes in outside of it.
- Students who switched tabs during Focus Mode will have the ‘Off-task activity’ tag under their name. However, this tag does not affect their scores.
- Note: you can only do this in live test mode, not in classic, team, or homework modes. And, as I said before, this is for teachers in School or District Plans. It does not work for educators, like me, who are in Super Plans or, obviously, the free plans.
OK – I’ve got 3 or 4 more Quizizz things to share with you, but I’m going to save them for another blog post, so stay tuned!
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