MySudiyo not quite what I'm looking for...

Last Wednesday, I wrote about building an online quiz through Mystudiyo and this past week I had the opportunity to use it in my classroom. Here are my follow up thoughts.

Set up for kids was easy. I was able to get a class to the site and have them create an account with little or no problem. I sent them the URL for my quiz and they all successfully navigated to that spot and started taking the quiz. The results started popping into my reports section almost immediately. Some kids took the quiz several times and their highest score was posted. Most of them figured this out before me and took the quiz 2-3 times until they got a perfect score. I couldn't figure out a way to go in and see all their scores, just the highest. Don't think it's possible to look at anything but the highest?















We explored the program a bit as a class and discussed how they might use this application for their personal use and then moved on to the day's lesson.While I liked the setup and ease of use in the classroom, I was a little disappointed in the information I got back in the report. I won't be using this application for formal testing because:

• No way to limit number of times a student can take test or at least see their first score.
  
• In timing mode it gives me an adjusted score. I just want the number of right and wrong. I wish I could set this up in the reports also.
  
• I'd like a way to limit it to just my students. Having more names than kids makes grading a bit more difficult.
  

I'll use Mystudiyo for review activities. I see myself setting it up so the students can test themselves or compete against their classmates, but not as a tool for a formal grade. Some of the kids liked the program enough to say they would come back and use it on their own as a review tool.

This is still a beta program and I'll come back and take another look in a few months but until then, I guess it's back to the search engines to find something a little more suitable to my needs.

[Images captured from Mystudiyo web site: http://www.mystudiyo.com]

MyStudiyo for online quizzes

I've been wanting to implement online quizzing in my classes for quite some time. I want something where I can quickly put up a few questions. I want the application to have most of the following functions:

• Short answer or multiple choice
• Include pictures in the question
• Track students so they can't take quiz more than once or at least I'll know if they do
• Give the kids immediate feedback
• Inexpensive or better yet.... free
  

I mentioned Larry Ferlazzo's post "The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education" the other day and in that article he ranked My Studiyo as number six on his list and said:

" It’s without question, I believe, the best way to create online tests and quizzes. It’s easy to use, you can include multimedia, and others can add questions (that are moderated before they appear)."

That was enough recommendation for me to give it a try. I signed up for a free account (which was straight forward and painless) and jumped right into creating a quiz. I decided to make a quiz for my web design kids where they could look at a piece of bad html code and then pick the correct formatting out of four choices. Seemed like a good idea at the time but turned out to be a bad choice for my first try for a reason I shall soon reveal.

I had the opportunity to add an introduction. I wrote only a few words with the plan to come back and write something more informative after I finished the quiz. This turned out to be a problem. I couldn't seem to get back to that introduction page to write a nicer intro? Might be a glitch, but in the future, I will spend a bit more time here just in case.

I wrote five bits of bad code that I've seen in my class over the last week. I felt a little limited by how I could enter the question. I seemed to be able to write only one line. It wasn't until I was all done that I remembered the "Select Media" option.











This allowed me to write out something more similar to how a snippet of code might look. I grabbed this picture of a sample question (above) to show how what I wrote and how it would look in finished form (below).





















I wrote out my questions and answers and got the whole thing put together in about 20 minutes. Took me this long as I had to think up questions and reasonable wrong answers along the way. If I had been better prepared, I think it would have taken about as long as it took me to type. Only wait time was when I moved to each new question and that was around 10-20 seconds.

I previewed my quiz and immediately thought, "This was a waste of time!" Half of my questions and answers were blank. I was about to blow the whole site off when I realized that the blank questions and answers were where I wrote html code. I suspected the program was reading my code and trying to implement it. I tinkered with a few answers and that turned out to be the case. I quickly went in and made a few changes and got around this glitch that is only going to come up for those of us teaching html. There are work arounds so I'm not too concerned.

I had the option of giving feedback on each question and so I did. I could set a time limit for each question and set it at 60 seconds just to test out how that works. I also set it up so that the questions would appear randomly so students sitting next to each other would less likely be looking at the same screen.

I was given the opportunity to have two different endings and opted for scoreboard for this first quiz. It will give each student their score and an opportunity to see their ranking.

Then I got a unique URL where I can send my students to take the quiz. I won't post this until I try it out in the classroom so feel free to go take a peek.

I can also embed the quiz on a web page such as a personal blog. So, here it is that way. I have yet to get the embedded feature to work. Maybe you'll have better luck?



After going to the URL of my quiz, I realized my students would all have to create a login in order to take it. I went in and created a separate login pretending to be an eager 16 year old and took the test. That part worked fine. When I logged back in as myself, I was unable to see the student score? Another glitch?

I'm going to go ahead and try this out with my class and see what happens. I'm a little worried about getting their final score and I don't like that they all have to create an account. But, I'm willing to give it a spin in a "real classroom".

My thoughts so far:

• Easy to login and get my first quiz set up
• Editing a little slower and clunky than whey your first set it up
  
• Had a hard time testing the report functions.
  
• Wasn't able to get a working quiz to embed in either my Blogger blog or a Google sites page.
• There is a cookie that allows your browser to remember you when you return to the site. Great for a single user at a single machine but I am a little worried about this in a lab that sees 5-6 different users on each machine every day.

I'll be back with more info after I try it out with my students. If any of you have had experience using the program, please leave a comment.

[Images: All captured from http://www.mystudiyo.com/: Sept 20, 2008]

Quick Forms using Google Docs

I read about this Form function in Google Docs, then watched the embedded video below and was blown away. I know that I got here a few months after the party started (it was released in January) but it looks like it is going to be a great tool for educators. Right off the top of my head I can think of the following uses:

• Collect student information on first day of class
• Collect information from staff
• Create a fast survey
• Create a quick quiz
• Collect data from friends and family (birthdays, anniversaries, etc)

I'll share my progress as I experiment with this over the next couple of months and prepare some things to start the 2008 school year. I am jumping in with a quick one question survey for my readers as my first try at creating a form.


I'll post the information I gathered in a week and give some feedback on how well it worked.





[Image: Flickr: "Survey Says..."; hfabulous: http://www.flickr.com/photos/henryfaber/230444653/]