In the wake of COVID-19, many schools across all grade levels have moved to online education and virtual instruction. Because of this, teachers have had to be flexible – and oftentimes creative – with not only delivering content to students, but also ensuring that they’ve mastered it. In years past, teachers have turned to formative assessment strategies to address student understanding of material and adaptation of content. Now, in the era of virtual learning, online quizzes have been serving as a means of assessment to ensure that students are truly learning what we teach them. Read on to find out more about how online quizzes benefit virtual learning environments, as well as how to use them in your own classroom.
Ways to Facilitate Online Education
There are several valuable methods and resources available for facilitating an online classroom. Platforms such as Canvas, Google Classroom, and Blackboard allow you to manage classroom data as a whole, as well as post and view assignments that students will be able to access on their end. You can build classrooms that feature video lectures, discussion boards, or places to submit digital assignments, as well as links to supplemental content.
In addition, many online platforms offer engaging games and activities for students of all grade levels to access. Resources such as Animoto, Khan Academy, Nearpod, and Duolingo provide students with a multitude of diverse opportunities to learn bite-sized lessons or even create their own fun projects. Finally, websites and programs such as Kahoot, Fyrebox, and Google Polls allow instructors to create short, interactive quizzes for students to participate in that will collect student data. Collecting this data can be extremely beneficial as it allows teachers to quickly analyze a student’s performance and determine where any gaps in their understanding may lie.
Benefits of Online Quizzes
The primary benefit of an online quiz is, of course, the same benefit of any type of academic quiz: to assess a student’s understanding of a subject. Quizzes may also be utilized to gather data on student preferences. One of the benefits of virtual quizzes over hard-copy quizzes is that data is gathered, sorted, and interpreted automatically, and then transferred to you quickly. This is a benefit of using online quizzes over paper quizzes within the physical classroom as well. Data can be viewed aggregately as well as independently, so you can see how your class is doing as a whole, as well as how students are doing as individuals. This is especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic as virtual instruction often does not allow us to observe student behavior as naturally as we would if we were in the classroom. With a tool like a quiz that gives valuable insight into student performance and progress, any issues can be identified quickly and addressed with either the individual student or the class as a whole. This allows the learning experience to be heightened for all.
Online quizzes can also be used to motivate students, especially if they are in the form of a game or in a format that is considered familiar or fun. For example, Fyrebox offers a program that allows students to answer quiz questions through a messenger app that then collects their responses. This is a format that is both more engaging and less confusing for the student, so they can feel more comfortable while preparing their responses.
Fyrebox Quiz Creation
One of the best resources for online quiz creation is Fyrebox, a program that allows the user to create custom, personalized quizzes in the format of messenger apps. This program has recently been improved in response to the switch towards online instruction, so that teachers can have a higher tech quiz interface that is more suitable and appealing to the younger generation. Not only is it presented in a messenger app format, making it familiar and more readable, but it also provides students with certificates for passing a quiz to show that they have completed it. Made possible through a partnership with Canva, these certificates can also be designed which will further excite and engage students.
Here is a great explainer:
Once students are sent the quizzes in text format, they can answer the questions by reciprocating with a text of their own. This is highly engaging for students who are used to this format, which many often view and use every day. It is also accessible through Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat. The answers are recorded and sent to you immediately, where you can analyze and address the data in real time, with data presented either individually or as a group. This means that you can respond to data immediately from your home, without having to filter through student answers, data, or physical papers.
Conclusion
In summary, the way we conduct online education becomes increasingly important the longer that students are submerged in it. We need to be more flexible and creative in the assignments and assessments we create, and online quiz creation with tools such as Fyrebox is one easy way to accomplish this. Online quizzes, even when used in the in-person classroom, are more engaging and interesting, and can be delivered in a format that is familiar and fun for students. They also allow for the systematic and organized collection of student data, that is much easier to view and interpret than several pages of unorganized paper responses.
