Last week I had the pleasure of attending the School Library Association of New Zealand Aotearoa (SLANZA) 2015 Conference and it was an absolutely amazing showcase of the strengths of School Librarians and Teacher Librarians from NZ and Australia. Amongst all of this amazing talent, I was privileged enough to deliver a workshop on a topic that is applicable to all streams of teaching - using online quizzes to engage your students.
There is a wealth of literature around about how games can engage learners and quiz tools can be a part of this. You can have a look at some articles about Gamification on Gale Educator’s Reference Complete (this is available through EPIC and you may need to see your friendly librarian for your school’s username and password).
At SLANZA 2015, my workshop looked at using two Web 2.0 quiz tools - Kahoot! and Socrative. Myself and many teachers at St Margaret’s College have been successfully using these tools with our students and while they are amazing to use in the classroom they are not just limited being there! Our amazing Languages Faculty had the whole school doing a Kahoot! in an assembly last term and I recently used Socrative for a school wide quiz during our Book Week celebrations. If you are interested in this experience, I wrote a blog post about it which you are welcome to read.
These tools are free, easy to set up and super fun so why not get started! This slide presentation details some reasons to use these tools, outlines the main features of each website and gives basic instructions on how to get set up. Give it a go!
Sarah Coursey - Library and e-Learning Centre Manager at St Margaret's College
