The Significance of Failure in Defining Success

One of the great misunderstandings of the learning process is that one must expect perfection or a lack of mistake-making when trying something new. Learning from one's failures and improving upon them is essential in becoming better at what you do.  This video of a student who has designed a way to "trap" a monster using a Rube Goldberg machine is a wonderful illustration of this. 

Tech Tidbits: Quizizz--Interactive Quiz Generator

One of the important tasks that teachers must do during the course of instruction is to informally assess students in order to measure their comprehension of what is being taught.  This enables the instructor to determine how best to modify their instructional techniques in order to best address a students' needs.  A fun way that teachers can assess students' comprehension of a topic is through the use of Quizizz, an interactive quiz generator that allows you to create your own interactive multiple choice game, or use a quiz created by other users.  

Quizizz does not require you to sign up for an free account if you want to use other users' quizzes with your students, but if you want to create your own quiz, you will need to register for an account.  Creating a quiz is a very simple process, and once a quiz is published, it generates a unique numeric code that you can share with your students in order to join the quiz.  Students go to join.quizizz.com and enter the 5-digit code in order to join the quiz.  Each student can then answer the questions to the quiz.  The teacher determines the amount of time students are given to answer each question, from 5 seconds to 5 minutes. 

As students progress through the quiz, they are awarded a varying amount of points based on whether they answered the question correctly and how quickly the question was answered. Zero points are awarded for incorrect answers. Teachers can see how students are answering questions on their screen and track the progress of each student.  Once the quiz is completed by all students, the teacher can download an Excel file that displays the information from the quiz, including the students who participated, which questions they answered, and how they answered the questions.  Teachers can use this data as an informal assessment to see which students are struggling with the information, and which students are comprehending the content.