Riddle Makes it Easier to Create Online Quizzes

Over the last year Riddle has become my favorite tool for creating online quizzes and polls outside of Google Forms. The latest update to Riddle makes it easier than ever before to quickly customize your quizzes. You can now simply drag and drop questions into order in your Riddle quiz editor. This makes it much easier to shuffle the order of questions so that you can give one version of a quiz to one group of students and give a different version of the quiz to another group of students.

Watch my video embedded below to learn more about how Riddle works.



Applications for Education
Riddle's format of using images as response choices could make it a good option for giving informal quizzes on topics that require a lot of visuals. For example, a quiz on fractions might use pictures which represent various fractions. A quiz on art history might use Riddle to showcase works of art of answer choices.

Clip Choose - Create Video-based Polls

There are lots of tools on the web for creating and hosting polls. You can find a list of some good ones here. Most of those polling services are simply text-based or text and images. Clip Choose is different because your polls are based on videos.

To create a Clip Choose poll you enter the URLs of up to eight YouTube videos. After entering your videos your audience then votes for their favorite video or whatever prompt you give them regarding the videos.

Applications for Education
Clip Choose is one of those resources that I sat on for a couple days because I wasn't quite sure what I would use it for. Then it hit me that Clip Choose could be a good tool to use to create video quizzes for a lesson about bias and propaganda. When teaching students about types of propaganda I could put two or three videos in Clip Choose and ask students to select the one that demonstrates the use of a particular propaganda technique. For example, if I wanted my students to practice recognizing the use of "glittering generalities" I would put in a video that demonstrates that method and two videos that don't.

Best of the Summer - Tools for Gathering Feedback

For the next few days my schedule is packed with travel and two conferences. At the same time, historically this week is when many readers return to the blog after taking a break during the summer. Therefore, for the next couple of days I'll be re-running the most popular posts since June 1st, 2012.

Urtak is a free and simple polling service that can be used on any blog or website. The polls you create can have multiple questions, but they must be "yes or no" questions. But Urtak isn't that limited because visitors to your poll also have the option of writing in their own questions. You can get started using Urtak in seconds by registering with your Twitter or Facebook account. You can also use your email address to create an account with Urtak. Urtak polls can be embedded into your blog or you can direct people to your poll by sharing the unique url Urtak assigns to your poll.

Kwiqpoll is a simple tool for quickly creating and posting polls. To create a poll with Kwiqpoll just visit the site, type a question, type your answer choices, and go. Your poll can stay online for three or seven days. Kwiqpoll assigns a unique url to each of your polls. Give that url to the audience that you want to participate in your poll.

Hall.com is a service for quickly creating and hosting online collaboration spaces. On Hall.com you can create your own space, quiet appropriately called Halls, in which you and your teammates chat, take notes, and manage to-do lists together. In your Hall you can also post polls and surveys to gather feedback from your group.

Understoodit is a new web app for quickly gauging your students' understanding of information that you have shared with them. I saw it in action for the first time last week when my Ed Tech Teacher colleague Greg Kulowiec used it during a workshop we taught. Understoodit is quite simple. Just open your account (it's still in beta by invitation only) and open the simple poll of "understand" or "confused." Students can vote using any internet-connected device. Students can vote whenever you have the poll open. They can vote multiple times too. So if they are confused at the beginning of class, but understand ten minutes later they can change their votes.


Simple Meet Me is a free service for quickly creating an online chat room with anyone you like. To use the service just go to SimpleMeet.Me and click on the link below the chat code. That code appearing when you visit SimpleMeet.me is the code you can give to anyone you want to join your chat. Anyone joining your chat just needs to enter that code to join you. Registration on SimpleMeet.me is not required.

Socrative is a system that uses cell phones and or laptops (user's choice) for gathering feedback from students. You can post as many questions as you like in a variety of formats. One of the more "fun" question formats is the "race" format in which students can work individually or in teams to answer questions as quickly as possible.

Poll Everywhere is a service that allows you to collect responses from an audience via text messaging or web input from a computer. The free plan for K-12 educators provides selection of features and quantity of responses that is adequate for almost any classroom. One of the neat ways to display feedback gathered through Poll Everywhere is in word clouds. The word cloud feature integrates with Wordle, Tagxedo, and Tagul.

Mentimeter allows you to pose a question to your audience and get instant feedback on that question through cell phones, tablets, and any other Internet-connected device. Mentimeter doesn't have has many features as Socrative or Poll Everywhere, but it is free and very easy to use. In the video below I provide a two minute demonstration of Mentimeter. 


TodaysMeet is a free chat service that can be used for holding a back-channel discussion with students and colleagues. If you're not sure what a back-channel chat with students would look like, I encourage you to read Silvia Tolisano's post about using back-channels with elementary school students. Silvia's blog is where I first learned about TodaysMeet three years ago. TodaysMeet is completely free to use. Setting up a chat area in TodaysMeet is very simple. To set up your chat area just select a name for your room (that name becomes the url for your chat area), how long you want your room to exist, and select an optional Twitter hashtag for your chat area. To invite people to your chat area send them the url.

Chatzy is a neat little website that provides a free platform for hosting your private chat area. To use it, simply name your chat area, select your privacy settings (you can password protect it), then send out invitations. Instead of sending out invitations you could just post the link to your chat area.

Pollmo is a free service offering an easy way to create and post simple polls online. Getting started with Pollmo is easy. Just head to their site, type your question, type your response choices, and select a color theme for your poll. Then just copy the embed code provided to place your poll on your blog or website. Don't have a blog or website? Then just direct people to the url assigned to your Pollmo poll.

Backchan.nl is an open-source backchannel tool developed at the MIT Media Lab. Using Backchan.nl you can create an online forum through which users can exchange messages in response to a presentation they're watching. There are a lot of free services that do the same thing, but there are a couple of things that make Backchan.nl different. Backchan.nl allows you to select a start and end time for your backchannel. As the administrator of a Backchan.nl account you can create and manage multiple backchannels and schedule them to go live at different times. Backchan.nl also includes voting tools that participants can use to vote messages up or down.

Polls.io - Quickly Create Simple Surveys

I've written about a lot of polling and survey services in the past. Most recently I shared this list of twelve good ones that range from simple one question tools to more feature-laden tools. This morning I learned about another good and simple tool for quickly creating an online poll.

Polls.io allows you to create simple one questions polls in a matter of seconds. To create a poll just go to Polls.io and type your poll question. Then you can enter up to eight answer choices for respondents to select from. Your poll is automatically assigned a url. To get people to take your poll just direct them to the url and they can vote instantly. Registration is not required to create a poll or to answer a poll.

Applications for Education
Polls.io, like other polling services, could be useful for informally polling your students with questions like "do you feel prepared for the next assessment?" or "which topic(s) should we review again?"

11 Web-based Polling and Survey Tools

Yesterday, I wrote a short post about Kwiqpoll. After that post was published I got a few requests for suggestions about other web-based polling/ survey tools. Here are eleven other ways you can conduct polls and surveys online.

MicroPoll makes it very easy to create a poll, customize it, and embed it into your blog or website. To use MicroPoll just enter your question, enter answer choices, and enter your email address. After completing those first three steps you can preview your poll, change the theme (look) of your poll, and get the embed code for your poll.

Flisti is a free and easy-to-use polling tool. Registration is not required in order to create a poll with Flisti. In fact, registering doesn't seem to be an option at all. To create a poll using Flisti just enter your question, specify some answer choices, then click "create new poll." Your poll(s) can be embedded into your blog, website, or wiki.

Quiz Snack offers a free service for creating polls and quizzes to post in your blog or website. To use Quiz Snack you can sign in with your Twitter, Facebook, Google, or Quiz Snack account. Then select one of three poll/quiz formats, type your question(s) and answer choices, and select a template. Then copy the embed code provided by Quiz Snack and place it your blog or website.

Pollmo is a free service offering an easy way to create and post simple polls online. Getting started with Pollmo is easy. Just head to their site, type your question, type your response choices, and select a color theme for your poll. Then just copy the embed code provided to place your poll on your blog or website. Don't have a blog or website? Then just direct people to the url assigned to your Pollmo poll.

Urtak is a free and simple polling service that can be used on any blog or website. The polls you create can have multiple questions, but they must be "yes or no" questions. But Urtak isn't that limited because visitors to your poll also have the option of writing in their own questions. You can get started using Urtak in seconds by registering with your Twitter or Facebook account. You can also use your email address to create an account with Urtak. Urtak polls can be embedded into your blog or you can direct people to your poll by sharing the unique url Urtak assigns to your poll.

Using Yarp you can create a simple one question survey or one line event invitation. To create a Yarp survey select "survey" on the homepage, type a question, then select your answer format. All answer formats present only two options along the lines of "true or false" or "yes or no." Yarp invitations use the same format styles as Yarp surveys.

Vorbeo is a free service for creating polls for your blog or website. To use Vorbeo just type your question, enter your answer choices, select a background color, and specify the width of your polling widget. Then copy the embed code provided by Vorbeo and paste it into the html editor of your blog or website.

Obsurvey gives you the flexibility to create multiple choice surveys or open-ended surveys. Setting up a survey with Obsurvey is an easy process. To set up a survey simply select your question format and then edit the questions and answer choices using the text editor. The video here shows you how to set-up Obsurvey.

Polldaddy is one of the most recognized platforms for online polling. The free Polldaddy plan allows you to create polls or surveys containing up to ten questions. Poll/ survey results are displayed in real-time.

Kwik Surveys is a free survey tool that offers a bunch of excellent options. Kwik Surveys gives you the option to mix and match eleven different types of questions. You can administer your survey by posting it on a blog, website, or discussion forum. You can also email your survey to the people you want to take it. If you choose the email option, you can track who has taken your survey and restrict respondents to taking the survey only once.

Using forms in Google Documents you can create a simple survey or poll, gather the data, and then select from any number of gadgets and scripts to create visualizations of that data. You can find directions for creating a survey here. If you're a Blogger user, Blogger has a poll gadget that you can customize and insert into the sidebar of your blog.

Kwiqpoll - Simple Web Polls

Kwiqpoll is a simple tool for quickly creating and posting polls. To create a poll with Kwiqpoll just visit the site, type a question, type your answer choices, and go. Your poll can stay online for three or seven days. Kwiqpoll assigns a unique url to each of your polls. Give that url to the audience that you want to participate in your poll. Here's the link to a simple poll that I made.

Applications for Education
Kwiqpoll could be a good tool for quickly gathering anonymous feedback from students on things like how long it took them to complete a homework assignment or how prepared they feel for an upcoming assessment.

H/T to Larry Ferlazzo.

Urtak - Find Out What Your Audience is Thinking

Urtak is a free and simple polling service that can be used on any blog or website. The polls you create can have multiple questions, but they must be "yes or no" questions. But Urtak isn't that limited because visitors to your poll also have the option of writing in their own questions. Try it out for yourself in the poll I've embedded below.

Practice Poll

You can get started using Urtak in seconds by registering with your Twitter or Facebook account. You can also use your email address to create an account with Urtak. As you can see above, Urtak polls can be embedded into your blog or you can direct people to your poll by sharing the unique url Urtak assigns to your poll.

Learn more about Urtak in this Building 43 video in which Robert Scoble interviews Urtak's CEO.


Applications for Education
Urtak could be a useful tool for quickly collecting informal feedback from students. I like to run polls on my course blog about a week before a test. I use these polls to gauge how my students are feeling about the course content and what we may need to spend more time studying.

Hall.com - A Place to Chat and Collaborate

Hall.com is a new service for quickly creating and hosting online collaboration spaces. On Hall.com you can create your own space, quiet appropriately called Halls, in which you and your teammates chat, take notes, and manage to-do lists together. In your Hall you can also post polls and surveys to gather feedback from your group.

Creating a Hall on Hall.com takes just a few minutes. You can sign up with your Facebook credentials or you can register using your name and email address. Once your Hall is created you can invite others to join you via email, Twitter, or Facebook. Your Hall is assigned its own URL that you can direct people to to join you. As a registered Hall.com user you can make your Hall private and require a password for users to enter before joining your Hall.

Applications for Education
Hall.com could be a great service for teachers to create a place to post notes and for students. Students could join a teacher's Hall to ask questions and participate in group discussions. Teachers could also use the poll app in Hall.com to collect feedback from students on questions like, "do you feel prepared for next week's test?" or "how long did it take you to complete assignment x?"

I've seen Hall.com Tweeted by a bunch of people over the last 24 hours, but Larry Ferlazzo's blog was the first place I saw it. 

Pollmo - A Quick & Easy Poll Creation Tool

Pollmo is a free service offering an easy way to create and post simple polls online. Getting started with Pollmo is easy. Just head to their site, type your question, type your response choices, and select a color theme for your poll. Then just copy the embed code provided to place your poll on your blog or website. Don't have a blog or website? Then just direct people to the url assigned to your Pollmo poll.


Applications for Education
Placing a poll or survey on your course blog can be a good way to get some informal feedback from students about any number of things. Or you could have students create surveys and use that data in a lesson about mean and median. Students could create a poll and then try to determine what the results say about their class or school as a whole.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
MicroPolls - Web Polls Made Easy
Quiz Snack - Create Simple Polls and Surveys
Nine Survey Tools for Teachers and Students

Quiz Snack - Create Simple Polls and Surveys

Quiz Snack offers a free service for creating polls and quizzes to post in your blog or website. To use Quiz Snack you can sign in with your Twitter, Facebook, Google, or Quiz Snack account. Then select one of three poll/quiz formats, type your question(s) and answer choices, and select a template. Then copy the embed code provided by Quiz Snack and place it your blog or website.



Applications for Education
Posting a simple poll or survey on your course website can be a good way to get some quick, informal feedback from your students as to their levels of comfortability with your course's content. Some blog and website services have polling tools built-in. If your chosen blog or website platform doesn't have a polling tool, take a look at Quiz Snack.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Nine Survey Tools for Teachers and Students
Text the Mob - Poll Your Audience
7 Sites to Help Students Choose and Apply to Colleges

Flisti - Quickly Create and Share a Poll

Flisti is a free and easy-to-use polling tool. Registration is not required in order to create a poll with Flisti. In fact, registering doesn't seem to be an option at all. To create a poll using Flisti just enter your question, specify some answer choices, then click "create new poll." Your poll(s) can be embedded into your blog, website, or wiki.

Pepsi or Coke?

Coke

Pepsi

Water

or View Results

Create your own poll at Flisti.com

H/T to Larry Ferlazzo for the link.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
MicroPoll - Web Polls Made Easy
Nine Survey Tools for Teachers and Students

MicroPoll - Web Polls Made Easy

Yesterday, I gave a run-down of nine survey tools that teachers and students can use. Today, I came across another survey tool that should be added to that list. MicroPoll makes it very easy to create a poll, customize it, and embed it into your blog or website. To use MicroPoll just enter your question, enter answer choices, and enter your email address. After completing those first three steps you can preview your poll, change the theme (look) of your poll, and get the embed code for your poll.

Applications for Education
Conducting surveys is a good way for students and teachers to collect data that can then be used for lessons on fractions and percentages. I remember in elementary school my class surveyed the school about breakfast cereal preferences then we had to create pie charts and other data displays using the survey results.

Nine Survey Tools for Teachers and Students

On many occasions in the past I've written here and shared on other forums that I think placing a survey or poll on your classroom blog or website is a great way to get informal feedback from your students. I usually put a survey on my class blog a week or so before any formal assessment that my students are going to take. That feedback helps me identify the areas that my students need more help and or clarification on.

Here are nine tools that you can use to put a survey or poll on your class blog.

Using Yarp you can create a simple one question survey or one line event invitation. To create a Yarp survey select "survey" on the homepage, type a question, then select your answer format. All answer formats present only two options along the lines of "true or false" or "yes or no." Yarp invitations use the same format styles as Yarp surveys.

Vorbeo is a free service for creating polls for your blog or website. To use Vorbeo just type your question, enter your answer choices, select a background color, and specify the width of your polling widget. Then copy the embed code provided by Vorbeo and paste it into the html editor of your blog or website.

Urtak is a free and simple polling service that can be used on any blog or website. The polls you create can have multiple questions, but they must be "yes or no" questions. But Urtak isn't that limited because visitors to your poll also have the option of writing in their own questions. You can get started using Urtak in seconds by registering with your Twitter or Facebook account. You can also use your email address to create an account with Urtak. Urtak polls can be embedded into your blog or you can direct people to your poll by sharing the unique url Urtak assigns to your poll.

Buzz Dash is a free polling service that allows anyone to create a poll to use on any blog or website. There are a lot of survey and polling widgets that you can use on your blog (in fact, Blogger has one built-in), but what I like about Buzz Dash is that your poll results instantly update whenever someone votes. The update happens without the need to refresh your page in order to see the new poll results. Buzz Dash has gone out of business. Read about it here if you like.

Obsurvey gives you the flexibility to create multiple choice surveys or open-ended surveys. Setting up a survey with Obsurvey is an easy process. To set up a survey simply select your question format and then edit the questions and answer choices using the text editor. The video here shows you how to set-up Obsurvey.

Fluid Surveys is a good tool for quickly creating surveys that offer multiple response formats. Many free survey programs only allow one type of response format, multiple choice or text. Fluid Surveys allows you to combine both formats in one survey. The drag and drop interface is so easy to use that you can build a survey in less than a minute. Watch the video here to see how easy it is to use Fluid Surveys.

Stellar Survey offers free surveys that teachers and school administrators can use to get feedback about courses and instructors. Users can select from a predefined template and questions or create a survey from scratch. The free, basic account only allows 50 responses per survey so it is not ideal for large classes, but for most teachers 50 responses will adequate.

No list of survey tools would be complete without mentioning the following two very popular services.

Polldaddy is one of the most recognized platforms for online polling. The free Polldaddy plan allows you to create polls or surveys containing up to ten questions. Poll/ survey results are displayed in real-time.
Poll Everywhere is a poll/ survey service that allows you to collect responses via text messaging. Post your question(s) on your unique Poll Everywhere survey and the audience can voice their opinion(s) using their cell phones. Survey results are available instantly. The free plan allows you to collect responses from up to thirty respondents.