App Share: Quizalize

It really is practically impossible to keep up with all of the tools that are out there these days for the technology rich learning environments we have. Eventually, the really good and engaging ones filter to the surface. Kahoot! remains one of the popular ones in our schools. Or at least it seems to be based on how frequently I hear their signature music. But that makes it more challenging as some students will automatically tune out as soon as they hear it start up.

Quizalize is a similar product that may be worth checking out for boosting engagement in your classroom. There are several aspects of it that I think make it, potentially, a better option for some teachers based on the feedback I've heard so far.

The first perk to Quizalize is that it does connect with Google Classroom. It won't feed the "grades" back and forth, but it does make it easier to share the Quizalize with a group of students via your existing Google Classroom roster. Alternatively, students can also join a class with the typical join code style login that they are already familiar with, which is similar to Kahoot.

Beyond that, Quizalize brings the teaching back into a gamified assessment. They make it easy to see who is struggling and with what. I love that they let you tag a questions with a specific topic and then breaks down each student's results based on how they did on each of them. That means you can tell that a particular student does well with one theory or topic, but needs help reviewing another. The teacher's dashboard also gives you an overview of which questions are hardest for the entire class as well as who is struggling the most.

Here is a good introductory video to walk you through how to get it set up:

For math teachers, they do have a math mode that helps to make formulas really easy to enter and look good. I found a blog post they wrote about it over here.

I know that the first concern is that it is a team based game. But I see no reason why you couldn't have the kids join with the code and then never project the actual team quiz. I don't see any sort of result on the student's page that would tell them how their "team" did.

Hopefully you have a moment to check out Quizalize. It certainly looks cool to me! Let me know what you think and what your students' reaction to it is.