Omnivorous Surfer

used by permission

Thanks to a former colleague, I was reminded of the FREE online quiz software I used to use. On investigation, I found that it is still available and still FREE. Perhaps some who read this may find it useful.

QuizStar is one of several online tools made available at 4teachers.org. Students can take quizzes or tests you have created and then see their results and review their individual answers immediately. As the instructor, you will have a report that looks much like a gradebook for that assignment and can also view their individual test "papers" as though they had been printed and scored.

One of the things I especially appreciated was the listing at the bottom of the test report page showing the number of students answering each question correctly and incorrectly. This allowed me to quickly identify a "bad" question and/or a concept that needed to be retaught. I could usually address the latter as soon as everyone had completed the test.

To prepare the students to take a quiz using QuizStar, I would create a simple 3-question quiz and make sure that they would miss one question. Then they could look at their test and see how to read the markings for the ones they missed. I would always give students the option of taking a paper test using QuizStar's printout.

I won't go through all the features; you can read those on the QuizStar website if you are interested. I used this program for at least 10 years when I was teaching in a lab and found it to be beneficial for teaching and learning and quite a timesaver, too.

I find I'm featuring others' blog posts (mostly educational in nature) here more often than before. That's partly because I'm reading them more, and partly because I'm hoping that some non-blog-readers who find their way here will be encouraged to check them out and begin searching for ones that match their interests, oh, and maybe begin blogging themselves.

Today I enjoyed the "Technology-Transformed Learning Environments" post on David Warlick's blog. Having a long-standing interest in using technology in the classroom, I appreciated his description of what technology-infused learning looks like (definitely read the blog for the details):

• learning fueled by questions
• students engaged in a way that provokes conversation
• learning situations responsive to the learner's actions
• learning experience compelling a personal investment by the learner and contributing to the learner's identity
• learning resulting from significant opportunities to safely make mistakes

If you're interested in and decide to read that post, be sure to also read a follow-up post, "Some Good Tech-Transformed SD Questions."

There's much to think about in these two posts. The level of benefit from the use of technology in education is obviously dependent on good teachers, those who know how to use it to its fullest potential for students. Teachers need to be constantly evaluating technologies and their teaching methods to see how they can more effectively engage learners and help them reach new levels of thinking, understanding, and knowledge.

Teachers--well, and others, too--would sometimes like additional fonts. Several sites (all of the ones below) have FREE ones available for download. The fonts available will include alphabets and dingbats (typographical ornaments or symbols).

Fonts4Free has some really cool holiday fonts among its collections.

Fontstock.net has literally hundreds to choose from (use the alphabetic selector on the left side; the search box is for another site).