Quizzes – ClassMarker

Quizzes, they are something that all teachers seem to use in their classrooms to test students’ knowledge and understandings at different stages of learning. In my own schooling I have completed many quizzes and have now, in prac placements written quizzes for my own students. Generally when I think of quizzes, I think of multiple pieces of paper with yes/no answers, multiple choice questions and then blank lines to fill in longer answers. It is time consuming to write/design and time consuming to mark. However, since I was at school I have noticed the changes in the way quizzes are presented to students.

In my current placement, the school is lucky enough to have interactive whiteboards in each classroom, which can be linked up to a program called ActivExpressions. (Promethean, 2009). Each child is given a ‘remote control/phone’ type device that is linked up the active expressions program on the computer and then projected to the whiteboard for students to see. Teachers are able to use a program very similar to ClassMarker to create quizzes for students to complete. I was able to watch the students complete different quizzes with multiple choice, multiple response, true/false, free text, punctuation and essay styled questions. Instead of being made to write answers, the students typed their answers in and were excited to complete different tests. After completing the tests, there was no need for the teacher to sit down and mark each students’ answers one at a time (making it a very time consuming task that can see teachers making marking errors after spending a long period of time looking at the same questions over and over). Instead, the results were calculated by the program, and students were able to see the questions again on the whiteboard, see the correct answers and be able to see graphs and statistics of all the students’ answers. I saw that this collaboration of the answers created active discussions and interest amongst the students and the content of the test itself. It made it more interesting and interactive for them.

Any program, similar to ClassMarker, I believe can provide a great learning and formative and summative assessing tool for teachers. It enables them to design personalised tests, modify them frequently and see results instantaneously after students complete the test/s. It definitively provides a more interactive way of testing students that is more technologically advanced than ‘boring pieces of paper and a pencil.’

Below this blog is a link to a very simple maths quiz I created just to test my skills at creating a quiz using this specific program. I even found a mistake in it when I tested it myself, and found that it was so great to be able to go back and quickly correct it!

http://www.classmarker.com/embedded_quizzes/?quiz=ae5fa4d6558b08afbed557bc9f887e69

REFERENCE

Promethean. (2009). ActivExpressions. Retrieved on July 25, 2009, from http://www.prometheanworld.com/server.php?show=nav.15997