Quizalize: The Good and The Bad

My students and I tried Quizalize for the first time this week.  I gave them a 10 question quiz over rational exponents, I replaced a mid-chapter quiz that was about 5 questions longer than last year with this short assessment.

The Good
I felt that Quizalize was different enough from Kahoot! and Quizizz for students.  Students play in teams instead of individually which was a major downfall of Kahoot! where students played individually and scores of kids who did poorly were also shown on others tablets.  All you see now is how much each person got right on one question as they progress through the quiz.

Another great thing about Quizalize from Kahoot is that I gave a reward for being in the Top 5, where as I gave a reward to half my class even if some students did poorly they still part of the winning team.


Another great part of Quizalize is that it gives teachers automatic feedback on the "6 need help part."

It breaks down students into 3 categories, students who got it, who almost have it, and students who need help.  As a teacher this provided me a great formative assessment and I could split students into three different categories and gave them individual attention and personalized instruction.

1. Students who got it, didn't have homework. (I am a big proponent of not giving homework if students know how to do the problems.)
2. Students who needed some help had a front and back assignment where they only had to do the problems they didn't know.  If they did need help they had to find one of the students who didn't have work to do and ask them.
3. Students who needed help had both pages, but had all the questions and we sat in a different corner of the room and got 1-1 instruction.  Students had whiteboards and we went over 1 question in each section and students did the other problems.

The last big thing that Quizalize does different from the other two big formative assessments, is that at the end of the quiz you can see what students missed each question.

I could tell that students had a tough time going from exponential form to radical form, we addressed that the next day with a small mini-lesson, 5 question homework, with an exit ticket before moving on to the real lesson.

The Bad
Another improvement on Quizizz is that all the questions are on the students iPad when playing this game. It doesn't have the cool functionality of Quizizz with the memes, but does have some cool fireworks when a student gets the correct answer.

The only real problems I had was in the question editor mode.  When putting pictures in, it made my pictures smaller and some students had a tough time seeing it on their iPads.  Lastly, the math editor on Quizalize didn't make editing the questions any better.

The only thing in math editor was that it gave me an answer explanation which would be good if students had an un-timed quiz or were doing more of an inquiry quiz.

Great tool though that has a ton of features for using data-driven instruction.  Lots of good things to come from Quizalize.