Right off the bat, you’ll probably notice that QuizPedia is designed with mobile users in mind. While you can absolutely do everything you’d want to do from a desktop or laptop, it’s great to see an educational app designed with phones and tablets in mind as well, which is also perfect for BYOD classrooms.
If you are using the desktop version, the first thing you’ll see when you login are your quiz analytics. You can get a breakdown of how many quizzes have been started, how many have been completed, and also how many have been shared out. You can also choose to create a new quiz or check out their tutorial.
When you choose to create a new quiz, either in the iOS/Android app or on the web, the first thing you’ll want to do is pick a theme. While this may seem like a needless step, I kind of like it especially for student-created quizzes, as it gives them more ownership over the design of the project, which is always nice. You can also change the theme at anytime.
The image above is from the web version of QuizPedia, and as you’ll see, it’s designed to look like I’m building from within a mobile device. Regardless of which you use (mobile vs. desktop), your experience will be essentially the same, since the web-based version is designed to look so much like you’re building on a phone.
From here you can add in a quiz picture, give your quiz a title and description, and choose a category (aka add a hashtag) for your quiz as well. Once you’re done with that you’re ready to start adding in questions.
Each quiz can have as many questions as you want, and you can choose to randomize the questions if you’d like to as well (from the settings menu). You also have the option of having the questions be in a poll format, with no right answer.
One of the things that I love most about QuizPedia is that both questions and answers can be images, something that I have yet to see in another online quiz builder. I think this can be incredibly beneficial across a wide range of grade levels and subject areas. Which graph is correct? Which chemical structure represents water? Which image conveys a dark tone? You get the idea, allowing students to select image responses opens up a door to tons of exciting possibilities at all age levels.
Once your quiz is finished and you close out of it, you’ll be able to see quite a few options, like editing, deleting, copying, embedding (awesome), and sharing. If you’re going to embed it, you can actually get the embed code and place it on another site, which is also something I haven’t seen with other quiz creation apps. Plus you have the ability to share it out through links or social media.
The only thing that would be beneficial to include here would be if there was a built in integration with services like Google Classroom or Edmodo or any other common school LMS. But aside from that, it’s easy to send out your quizzes to whoever you’d like to (be it teacher to student or student to other students)
You also have the ability to change the state of the quiz if you’d like to set it to only be active for a certain amount of time, or make it only visible to certain people as well, which is nice that all your quizzes don’t always have to be public just because you have a free account.
You can also see how many people have answered each question correctly by clicking on the “Answers” link. However, there’s a major shortcoming here, and that is you can’t see which students answered which questions. Even if you’re asking for a student’s name, there’s no way to get a line by line breakdown of which student answered which questions in which way. The reasoning the company gives for this (which is completely understandable), is that if you use QuizPedia as a student-centered activity, where students create and send out quizzes to other students, you wouldn’t want students knowing who has trouble with the content.
That being said, if you’re a teacher looking for a quiz tool to get formative or summative feedback on your class, and you need an individual breakdown of how your students are doing, then this isn’t the app for you.
On top of this, QuizPedia also reported back to me the wrong statistics. I answered this quiz twice, and question one should have had 1 correct answer and 1 incorrect answer, yet it reported it as 3/2 and 33%. When I reported this to the company they agreed it was a bug and resolved it. However, for a bug that significant to come up in app that isn’t in Beta, raises some serious concerns on my end.
Outside of those issues, my other complaint is something that apps like Aurasma (and many others) suffer from, which is that the very first thing you see when you get there are the featured and popular quizzes. Most of these have nothing to do with school, and some of these have inappropriate content as well. Obviously this can be tied into lessons on digital citizenship and online responsibility, but I think it would be beneficial if that wasn’t the very first thing students were exposed to on the site.
Another thing I’m not a fan of is the load time. You have to save each question and all your answers after you create them, and while it’s not a significantly long time to wait, it does make the process a lot more tedious if you’re trying to get a quiz created quickly for use. There was also a lot of wait time after creating a quiz, waiting for it to be published, trying to change the state, and things along those lines. Overall, there were just too many times were load times were significantly long enough to create annoyance.
So with all that in mind, I do think QuizPedia has potential, particularly if you’re looking for an application that gives students the opportunity to create fun quizzes to send out to your peers, but I would still be incredibly hesitant to recommend this app for classroom use, based on the issues I ran into. The ability to incorporate images as responses is wonderful, as is the ability to embed a quiz. But without reporting that can tell you how each student is doing, this app is really only beneficial for student activities, or quizzes where teachers only want to receive anonymous feedback.
The opinions expressed in this review are my own.
I was not compensated for writing this review.