photo credit: sergis blog

Good morning all!

Having students create their own quizzes is hardly an innovation; it’s been happening for years. When tasked with such an activity, kids will invariably design more thoughtful, challenging and intricate quizzes and tests than one would assume. The rationale behind this aside, I’m writing to share some tools designed to make it easy and fun for kids to do just that – online quiz (and game) makers.

The idea for today’s blog entry came from this post by prolific New Jersey blogger Keith Sloch, who recently presented at the NJEA Convention in Atlantic City (unbeknownst to me!) I’m familiar with ClassTools.net, though it has changed a bit since I reviewed it here on my blog a while back.

You can read Keith’s post for the details but in my view the beauty of ClassTools is kids can start creating content right away with a wide variety of templates. There are screencasts explaining the process, and even a Google Gadget for adding ClassTools to your iGoogle page. Handy!

As cool as ClassTools is, MyStudiyo.com is even cooler. (Thanks to Diigo user yuppi c for sharing the link!)

Registration is required, but, as far as I can tell, no account activation is needed, so for use with the under-13 set, a bogus email address can be used to create an account. (Sadly, this is a necessary evil for teachers at schools that do not provide student email). Once logged in, the pleasing wizard-driven user interface takes over, walking students through the process, which is pretty sophisticated (yet remains simple):

I love the ability to add introductory media – just brilliant! Provided, of course, the kids have access to it…

The rest of the interface is just as easy to use:

Once created, real-time statistics allow easy monitoring of results. The quizzes look great thanks to the available high quality “skins” and finished quizzes are easily embedded into blogs or wikis or other websites. Nice!

Now THIS could be a homework assignment that kids would LOVE … think about it. Given the content knowledge (which they have ready access to), and some guidance as to writing good questions, kids will be off and running. I’ll close with this quote from Keith’s blog post, which I think sums it up nicely:

Well, in about twenty minutes time, I had some very excited eighth graders on my hands. Not only were they pleased with what they produced, but one exclaimed, “Wow, I actually know this stuff now that I had to type it in to create the game.” (emphasis added)

Let’s face it – most of us will use any tool at our disposal to make learning fun and effective. Do-it-yourself interactive quizzes are one such tool!

Hope this helps!

-kj-