06.09.09
Keys to Quia
I participated in a Quia workshop today, and here are some helpful and important tips regarding this online tool:
- As a 4th grade teacher, it was easier for me to incorporate Quia than Moodle. Since I don’t teach an online course or publish my students’ grades online, Quia suits my needs and I found it more simple to use.
- I didn’t have to create a “class” for my group of 20 students, but doing so assigns each student their own username and password. With a username and password, a student can track his or her own progress. I can see how this feature would be useful for teachers who work with several different groups of students or teach different sections of one subject area.
- When I was ready to release activities to my students, I copied the URL for the activity, survey, or quiz and sent it to my students via email–without usernames and passwords. Sometimes we would complete activities as a whole group on the SMARTboard.
- Teachers can assigned their activities a “secret word” that only their constituents know. This allows teachers to control who is taking a quiz or survey, for example.
- Teachers can create class calendars through Quia, posting upcoming assessments or assignments through each class homepage.
- I ran into some trouble at times when my entire class attempted to complete an activity wirelessly on the laptops. In one situation, each child took a survey, submitted his or her results, and then received an error message; I had to then re-administer the survey to each child using the hard-wired Desktop computer. It was time-consuming and frustrating for the children, but I’m wondering if it wasn’t just a wireless issue…
- When a teacher has finished administering a survey, results can be exported into Excel spreadsheets.
- When students have submitted their answers to a quiz, the results are tabulated and recorded for the teacher; teachers receive recommendations regarding those students who need to review the given concept based on their quiz scores. Quia also provides quiz score mean and median information.
- The “Shared Activities” feature in Quia is wonderful! There are so many useful resources out there that teachers can copy into their individual Quia accounts and make their own. Teachers can even limit their search by looking for specific types of activities (jeopardy-type games, quizzes, word finds, etc.)
Here is a cheat sheet for understanding the types of activities you can create through Quia and an explanation of what I call the “control column”:
Learn more about Quia here.
Quia FAQs here.
