Edmodo Quizzes: Tips & Tricks

Edmodo's quiz feature is a versatile tool that saves teachers time. Whether used for quick informational checks or unit tests, the quiz feature enables teachers to assign formative and summative assessments with ease.  I use Edmodo Quizzes for assessing students' knowledge acquisition, practicing PARCC related digital literacy skills, and demonstrating students' application of knowledge learned through out the marking period. I will never grade a multiple choice quiz/test by hand ever again, and Edmodo quizzes provide a paperless way for me to easily read and score open ended, paragraph responses.

Formative Chunks

When my students are learning large amounts of information such as vocabulary words or types of literary
devices, I break the list up into smaller chunks and assign quick, no more than 8 questions quizzes. Leading up to the final test, students take one quick quiz per day and get immediate feedback on what they know and do not know. I will use multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank or matching type questions for my quick quizzes.


A note about fill-in-the-blank, you may run into issues with misspellings or students not providing the exact phrase/word. I don't mind encountering the errors/issues on the quick quizzes because I want students to learn from their mistakes and understand why they didn't get the correct answer. For quick quizzes, I usually do not use the short answer format because I want students to receive immediate feedback rather than wait for me to score their answer.

Summative Assessments

Summative unit tests can easily be given using Edmodo's quiz feature. I prefer to use the multiple choice and short answer formats because it avoids any issues with fill-in-the-blanks or matching and requires students to focus on the content of the assessment.

I can also link resources to specific quiz questions to assess high-level thinking skills.  On the summative test for our drama unit, I linked pictures of specific scenes from West Side Story, Romeo and Juliet, and Pygmalion and during our Odyssey unit, I included images from Odysseus' journey added to questions so that students had a colorful visual to refer to. For assessing visual analysis skills, Edmodo quizzes are much more effective than paper tests that included black and white  photocopied images.

My summative tests are open resources (book, notebook, web, etc), but my students quickly learn that they must know the material prior to the test because time is paramount. I purposely design tests with time in mind; students should spend approximately 30 seconds on multiple choice questions. If students are organized and prepared beforehand, they can quickly locate an answer they can't remember with out wasting too much time. While my summative tests do assess content knowledge, I'm also assessing and reinforcing organization and time management skills.

Time Management for Teachers 

Short Answer Response as First Question

To help speed up your grading time, when writing the Edmodo quiz, put your open-ended, paragraph response questions as the first questions on your quiz and then follow with your multiple choice, true/false, matching questions. I then select "randomize questions" so that the short answers are not usually the first questions the students encounter. How does this speed up my grading time? Well, when I open up each student's test responses, I have few clicks to get to the short answer responses I have to score.

When the short answer is last, I must click on MORE then
scroll down to last one to review responses.

At this time, students can take quizzes on either computers, Chromebooks, or iPads, but they cannot take a quiz on a smartphone or other personal device.  However, teachers CAN grade responses on any device. I've scored short answer responses while on my smartphone, iPad, Chromebook, home laptop, and school computer.

Edmodo also banks all questions that teachers create. When I want to create a new quiz, I can easily load questions from previous quizzes by searching using keywords. So I can reuse questions from my formative quick quizzes and include them on summative tests.

Edmodo Quiz is All I Need

Despite the plethora of online quiz tools available on the web, Edmodo is my go-to quiz creator: all quizzes are organized in the "Progress" area (gradebook), there is easy to see data analytics available, and, best of all, it saves me time creating and scoring assessments. While quizzes and tests are not my only method of assessing students, Edmodo makes it easy to do so when needed.