Over the past couple of years, review games like Kahoot!, Quizizz, and Quizlet Live have appeared in the classrooms. Teachers have shared that students seem to enjoy these activities due to the game like component. Each of the tools has its own strengths and weaknesses. These review activities can be a great way to collect formative feedback or just provide an opportunity for students to review ideas and concepts shared in class. As with anything else, these tools should not be over used in class as they will only become the ‘new worksheet’.
Inspiration
Earlier this year, in March, I came across a tweet from Mari Venturino. She had shared how students could create Quizizz games without needing an account. I was very intrigued with this. Currently, teachers would either have to find review games that have already been created in the tools listed above OR teachers had to spend the time to create their own game. I have also heard of students creating their own Quizlet study cards for a class that they make public for other students to then use. However, this means that one student is responsible for helping out the rest of the students in the class. Sure there is a time and a place for the scenarios listed above but Mari’s approach allows for the community of learners to support each other.
Mari’s idea allows for the work load to be spreaded evenly. Basically, the whole class creates a review game together with the help of a Google Form and Google Spreadsheet. Each student is asked to fill out a Google Form once to provide a question with possible choices as answers to the review game. Then the teacher curates them and uploads the questions to Quizizz platform for all students to play.
Process
In Mari’s blog post, she explains the whole process. (What I even love about her blog post is that she even provides a YouTube video walking through the process to help those that are visual learners.) Below is the quick snapshot of how it works
- Google Form is created for students where they provide
- a question
- choices for the question
- right answer
- amount of time to answer question
- Teacher views all submissions in Google Sheet
- Teacher downloads file as an excel spreadsheet
- Teacher uploads file in quizizz
- Teacher starts game for students
Over the summer, I had used the idea of crowdsourcing review questions with a group of math teachers in my #MathWithTech workshop. Several things were discovered/shared:
- Teachers thought the process was genius and loved the fact that they could get several questions in a short amount of time.
- Teachers should review questions prior to uploading to Quizizz. Just because you have 25 different choices does not mean you have to use all of them. Delete the rows that you don’t want before you download the file.
- If a teacher is short of time OR they want to be able to review questions prior to playing, ask students for a question the class prior. This way a teacher does not have to rush to get the review game ready on the spot.
- Teachers indicated that the amount of time was short for some questions. This came from the ‘amount of time’ question on the Google Form. Moving forward, I have made the adjustment on the form that Mari initially made so that the choices for time is only 30, 45, 60 seconds long. Because of this, I tweaked the original that Mari created. You can get a copy HERE.
- The right answer could in fact be wrong if the student made a mistake. Teachers would want to verify prior to playing the game.
All of this then got me to thinking that the other tools must have a similar feature allowing for a teacher to upload a file of data rather than creating right in the tool itself. Sure enough, I was right.
Quizlet
Quizlet seems to really make it easy. You could use a Google Form with just two questions, one for the term and one for the definition. You could also give students access to a Google Sheet where they would be assigned a row to add in the term in one cell and the definition in the other. You will notice that when you hit the “Create” button, below the title of your new Deck set, there are the words, “Import from Word, Excel, Google Docs, etc”. Then in the image below, Quizlet is only looking for two items (word and definition). You just copy and paste the info from a Google Sheet rather than uploading an entire file. AMAZING!
Kahoot!
Kahoot! also provides you with the opportunity to upload questions to its platform. Once you provide the basic information of the Kahoot! that you are making (title, description, audience etc), you are advanced to another screen that provides a link for importing information from spreadsheet.
Then, you can select the Excel file to see what order the questions have to be to mimic it in a Google Form. One note: Kahoot! has a limit in terms of the question length for characters. Questions cannot be longer than 95 characters and Answers cannot be longer than 60 characters. I have created a Google form so that these restrictions adhere to Kahoot!s requirements. You can get a copy HERE.
I hope that this inspires you to trying use the tool differently and move from teacher created activity to a student created activity. If you would like to talk more about how you can use this with your students in your curriculum, you know where to find me.
And that is my Spiel…
Craig M Sheil 