Quizizz Adds Three New Features Including Tools for Making Math Problems

This morning Quizizz, a popular classroom quiz game service, announced the launch of three new features that many teachers have wanted. Those features are polling, sound clips, and math equations. These are all features that you can use now when you create new games in Quizizz.

The new polling option lets you ask subjective questions and gather responses from your students. To do this you simply have to uncheck the option for "has correct answer" when creating a question.

The sound clips option lets you upload or record audio clips to use in your Quizizz games.

Finally, the question editor in Quizizz now includes an equation editor for creating math problems for your students to answer during a Quizizz activity.

🚨 Three new tools, billions of possibilities.

Now you can...

🙋‍♀️Add polls and subjective questions
➗Write formulas and math equations
🔊Record and upload sound clips pic.twitter.com/QsvPVPTLw5

— Quizizz (@quizizz) August 21, 2019

50 Years of Migration Waves

This morning while reading a National Geographic article about animal migrations in national parks I stumbled onto a related feature titled Migration Waves. Migration Waves is a series of graphs depicted the movement of humans between countries between the years 1967 and 2017.

The graphs on Migration Waves are grouped according to four factors that prompted migration. Those four factors are labor markets, political policies, political instability, and poverty. Each graph in the Migration Waves series has a caption that explains some of the conditions leading to migration.

Applications for Education
My first thought when viewing Migration Waves was to use it as a prompt for students to further investigate the causes of migration during the 50 years covered in the graphs. Then I thought some more about it and decided that a more challenging assignment would be for students to look at a couple of data sets then create their own similar migration waves graphs.

To find some a couple of data sets for students to use to generate their own migration waves graphs I turned to Google's Dataset Search. It was through Google's Dataset Search that I found this GDP by state and region spreadsheet (you'll have to create a free Data.World account to access) and found the Census Bureau's Population Distribution and Change document (PDF).

Google Dataset Search tool is still in beta. Earlier this year I published the following a short video about it.


If you would like to learn more about advanced search tools and strategies, join me tomorrow for Search Strategies Students Need to Know Now.

EDpuzzle Live Mode - Turn Video Lessons Into Group Activities

EDpuzzle has been my go-to tool for making video-based lessons and quizzes for many years. Just in time for the new school year EDpuzzle has released a new feature called Live Mode. EDpuzzle's Live Mode lets you take your existing EDpuzzle lessons or any new lessons that you create and turn them into group activities.

When you use EDpuzzle's Live Mode you project a video on a screen in the front of your classroom. Students watch the video on your projected screen while they have their laptops or tablets open. Then when a question appears in the video the video pauses and the question automatically appears on your students' screen for them to answer. As the teacher you can instantly see which students have answered and how they answered.

Watch my short video below to see how EDpuzzle's Live Mode works.



And if you have never tried EDpuzzle in any capacity, watch my complete EDpuzzle tutorial below.

Join Me This Friday for Practical Ed Tech Live

This Friday at 9am ET I'm bringing back my Practical Ed Tech Live series in which I answer batches of questions that readers like you send to me throughout the week. Additionally, this school year I'll open each broadcast with a recap of some ed tech news that you might have missed in the previous week.

I'll be broadcasting this live on my YouTube channel at 9am ET. (subscribe to my channel to be notified when I go live). You can ask me questions during the broadcast or submit them in advance to ensure that I'll see your question. You can submit questions through the form that is embedded below.

PrepFactory Offers Free, Personalized ACT & SAT Prep

SAT prep was one of the things that I used to do in my homeroom when I had junior year students. Many of the activities were directly from SAT prep books that I had purchased. Today, there are many excellent online options for SAT prep. One of the best options is available on PrepFactory.

PrepFactory offers students a great selection of free SAT and ACT preparation activities. PrepFactory focuses on helping students develop good test-taking strategies while also not boring them with dozens of continuous rote exercises. But before students even dive into the practice activities they can work through in-depth strategy review activities. To help students know what strategy to review or which practice assessment to take, PrepFactory has students complete diagnostics activities.

PrepFactory differentiates itself from other test prep websites by focusing on individual student diagnostics. In the PrepFactory programs, students are continually evaluated across all topics applicable to his or her test. The program then allows the student to skip over the content they’ve shown mastery of and it encourages students to spend extra time improving in areas they have not yet mastered. It's this type of practice that gets students away from repeating the easy tasks and forces them to focus on the difficult tasks.

Students can use PrepFactory independently or join a virtual classroom under a teacher's account. Teacher accounts have additional features including creating assignments and monitoring student progress. Fully-featured student and teacher accounts can be created for free.

Disclosure: PrepFactory is currently an advertiser on this blog.