CivieBlog

With the growth in interest in mobile learning and the ubiquitous nature of the i-pod among our younger (and increasingly older) students this piece of software looks like a really useful tool we can use to extend learning beyond the classroom.

The software I’m referring to is I-Quiz Maker. You can download I-Quiz Maker for free at:
http://www.iquizmaker.com/

Once you’ve installed it you can make quizzes using either True / False question types or Multiple Choice questions. The quizzes a very simple to make and you can make as many questions as you like and as many quizzes, as you like.

• This demo tutorial shows you how to create the quiz

This looks like a really useful tool to:

• help revise and develop your students vocabulary. You can write a vocabulary quiz and up- date it each week with new words that your students have learned
• get the students to create quizzes for each other and share them
• set up revision exercises

Although there is a bit of work involved in creating the quizzes, once you made them you’ll be able to keep them and use them again with other students.

Once you have finished creating your quiz you can then export it to your desktop and it can be uploaded to the I-pod through I-Tunes. The only catch here is that you and / or your students will need to buy the I-Quiz game for your I-pod. It is really cheap though (less than 1 US dollar / 79 p in the UK) and it does come with some ready-made quizzes.

What I like about it

• You can set the quizzes so that students get a maximum number of questions in each game and so that they loose after a specific number of wrong answers. This should make it more competitive.
• The game will randomise the questions so you could input 50 questions and they would get 10 or 20 random questions each game.
• It’s very easy to use and is just simple point and click
• You can update quizzes so that they grow as your students’ knowledge grows
• There's a version for PC and for MAC!
  

What I’m not so sure about

• Students will need an i-pod, they can’t just run the quiz on their computer or i-Tunes
• The game is only compatible with Fifth generation i-pods (This may become an advantage as more people trade up to more modern versions and the older ones become available more cheaply second hand) which isn’t much help for students with older i-pods.
• I couldn’t get the user manual to download so there wasn’t much documentation to help me learn how to use the software
• I think there may have been one more question type, but I couldn’t get the button for it to work ??
• Students will have to buy the I-Quiz game (though as I said it’s quite cheap) and that means setting up an i-tunes account.

On the whole though, despite the above drawbacks, if you have a classroom full of students who carry i-pods about then this could be just the thing for you.

Let me know how it goes

Best

Nik