Quizizz and ZipQuiz: Fun ways to learn!

Ever since I had the opportunity to talk to the creators of Quizizz in January of 2016, I have been fascinated by how hard they work and appreciate how active they are in continuing to seek feedback from educators.
Quizizz began in 2015, the idea of Ankit and Deepak, who wanted to create a learning tool that would help students and teachers in the classroom. I remember that first conversation. Hearing their story was so inspiring, knowing how hard they worked to achieve success, not giving up, really emphasizes the importance of working through challenges, setting goals, reflecting and to keep moving forward when you believe in something like they did. They did not give up but rather worked harder.

I had the chance to meet them face to face at ISTE in Denver last summer. I really enjoyed the conversation and seeing people learning about Quizizz for the first time. We have kept in touch, they send updates and announcements about new features on a regular basis and I have been fortunate enough to be included in some of the testing and conversations. My students even had some fun creating their own memes to be used in our games, imagine their surprise when I added some of theirs into our game the first time.

Photo from #ISTE17 Twitter feed

If you have not yet tried Quizizz, I recommend giving it a try for some additional ways to engage your students in learning and provide more opportunities for practicing the material. In addition to reinforcing the content material, students will definitely have a lot of fun in the process. The benefits of Quizizz are that not only can you play it live in class, it can be assigned for practice and students can redo the Quizizz game for extra practice and preparation whenever they want. Students can start a game and continue later as long as they use the same join code and user name, which makes it really beneficial for having the opportunity to learn anywhere and anytime, regardless of their schedule.

I caught up with the Quizizz team again this year at ISTE in San Antonio, before the conference officially kicked off and I was excited to learn about their newest app which is called ZipQuiz. I definitely enjoyed playing it, although I did not do so well and felt really bad when I was told at what grade level the questions were. I will not share that information now. But you can’t always remember everything, can you? Or maybe there is a way. This is what ZipQuiz can help you do!

So here is how ZipQuiz works:

Quizizz itself is a great way to review in the classroom and even use the games as an assessment for quick feedback for the students and for you to plan your next steps. And now, with the new app ZipQuiz, students are able to continue practicing and even compete against friends and others, on various school subjects whenever and wherever they want.

ZipQuiz is easy to use. Once students have the app, they simply need to select their appropriate grade level from 1st through 12th grade and choose one of the subjects that are currently available: math, science, English, history, geography, or even select the “fun” subject. All of the content in ZipQuiz is created by teachers and curated by editors at Quizizz.
Once the subject is selected, a quiz will be generated with a 60 second timer that the students can then start to play. Once the game ends, they have an option to challenge someone to try the same quiz and beat their score. Students can play these “solo” games and then share the games as challenges to friends or they can play in a “Versus” mode where they will be paired with other students from around the world. As for safety, I have been told there is not a way for students to communicate with each other through the app and so it is safe to play.
They showed me a few of the games and some of the features of ZipQuiz. I had a lot of fun playing it and trying to figure out the correct answers was not always easy, as the subjects were ones that I had studied many years ago. I look forward to trying this with my students and sharing it with colleagues and who knows maybe even challenging a few friends myself. But I think I should probably practice first to see if I need to practice on my subject knowledge

Currently it is available as an app for the iOS systems and they are of course working on the Android app, which I am sure will come out soon.

As for Quizizz, some of the other great features are that Quizizz integrates with Google classroom, it has great data tracking, teachers can look at reports and quickly understand which questions were answered incorrectly by all students and they can also look at each student’s response, question by question. Reports are saved, making it easy to go back in and check the results. There is also the option to send an email to parents with the student’s’ results from the Quizizz, which is a great way to keep that communication open with parents and share the assessment data.

Another fun meme, thanks Quizizz 🙂

For added fun, Quizizz also offers memes, question timers, music and the option of including a leaderboard, all of which can be turned on or off by the teacher, depending on their preferences.
Not a lot of time to create a game? No worries. There are thousands of public Quizizz games available, and creating a game is quite easy with the “search” feature. You can quickly create a game by gathering questions and adapting them to your specific content or changing the choices by using the search and pulling questions from the various public games available.

If you are looking for a new tool to start the school year with that provides some different options for learning and fun, try Quizizz. And if you have some fun ways to play or ideas to share, let me know, or contact Quizizz directly. They will be happy to hear from you!