PowerPoint Quizzes

I have seen PowerPoint quizzes used before, however I have never attempted to make one myself. A PowerPoint quiz that I remember seeing and liking was a few years ago on a school holidays activity for children where I was volunteering at. One of the activities that the children experienced was a modified version of ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ that had been created using PowerPoint. All the children loved it as the questions had been created to target their knowledge and understandings; it engaged them and in was interactive! They especially loved that the music of the 'Who wants to be a millionaire' TV show was played at certain stages of the clip, including the drum roll when waiting for the correct answer on the next slide. It made them feel like they were actually sitting on the real millionaire hot seat and they were excited because they had a chance of winning different prizes for reaching different levels of the quiz. The Quiz gave them a fun reason to want to take the questions serious and show that they had the knowledge to answer them correctly. This idea I would love to implement in a classroom one day to make learning fun and appealing for my own students.

When making a PowerPoint myself, I found it a bit confusing and fiddly even with an instruction page open in another browser to refer to. I soon got frustrated after spending some time working on it and needed to take a break and then come back to finish it. I found that the more time i practiced with it and fiddled around iwth different ideas, I began to get faster at making changes and creating a flowing, professional looking and appealing PowerPoint Quiz. If i was to choose to use ClassMarker or PowerPoint to create quizzes I would most likely choose to use ClassMarker because of its ease and because it takes a shorter amount of time to create.

Even though I would choose to use ClassMarker over PowerPoint, I do believe that ClassMarker, compared to Powerpoint Quiz is visually less appealing. With the PowerPoint program, the opportunities to create interesting, interactive and visually appealing slides (to suit the content of the quiz) would in turn make the quiz more appealing to students who need to take the quiz. It also gives them the opportunity to navigate their way through the PowerPoint Quiz depending on how it was created by the teacher. There are fewer limitations when designing PowerPoint Quizzes compared to ClassMarker.

When searching the internet for information about PowerPoint quizzes, I came across some sites that have PowerPoint quiz templates available to download. This, I thought would be a great tool for teachers to look into using if they are having trouble creating PowerPoint quizzes from scratch, however still want to use PowerPoint instead of other programs.

I can see PowerPoint Quizzes being used in the teaching of specific units of work and therefore they could be used for students to practice their knowledge (formative assessment) where students are able to be given feedback and practice their skills without being graded as such. ClassMarker, on the other hand could be used as a summative assessment tool at the end of a unit of work and provide teachers with a clear understanding of what students know and ultimately what they don’t know (more of a formal test/quiz, showing clear results and answers students chose). Oliver’s ICT model shows that in the learning process, quizzes are a tool to use for student learning tasks and can be used as a form of assessment along with tutorials, simulations, worksheets, databases and models. (Oliver, 1999, in AUTC, 2003). Not only can teachers create PowerPoint Quizzes for the purpose of their class, students can also learn how to create them to test each other and engage each other for specific educational units of work and topics.

REFERENCE

AUTC. (2003). Learning Design. Retrieved July 30, 2009, from http://www.learningdesigns.uow.edu.au/project/learn_design.htm