Supercharge Your Quizizz Use

In its early stages, it made sense to think of Quizizz mainly as a tool for assessment—a digital platform where teachers could create and conduct gamified quizzes. But 10 years have passed since its founding, and educators say that while the application still excels at helping them evaluate what students know (and what they don’t), that barely scratches the surface of its offerings today.

Quizizz has evolved into a “bell to bell tool,” according to instructional technology integration specialist Michelle Manning, having added features that make it a comprehensive suite of primarily free-to-use instructional aids (premium features available through the paid school- or district-level plan). Power users can not only assess, but teach, evaluate, review, and differentiate the tool's services for their students. But even newcomers “wouldn’t need to create anything,” explains co-founder Deepak Joy Cheenath: Between the application's generative AI tools and content library filled with resources like lesson plans, interactive videos, and flash cards made by teachers and students in over 150 countries, there's a lot to work with.

Are you already using Quizizz, but looking to level up? We spoke to several pro users to learn their secrets for maximizing its impact. Here’s how to get started.

Challenge Students to Dig Deeper

Assessment is still the beating heart of Quizizz. Though other applications can create quizzes for you, many allow students to “just guess or randomly click and power through too quickly,” says Jarom Grigg, a middle school science teacher. They don’t push students to “get as deep” as he would like.

Quizizz offers more than 15 types of questions ranging from multiple choice, true-false, and fill in the blank to options that allow students to draw, record an audio or video response, or explain their reasoning by typing up to 1,000 characters. You can mix question types within a quiz, seeking information on both your students’ recall and their ability to apply or transfer learning.

When answering a question, it’s important for students not just to know if they got it right or wrong, Manning says: “It’s important for them to know why the right answer is right, but also why the wrong answers are wrong.” Quizizz allows you to provide explanations once students answer and prompts them to give the question another try if they chose incorrectly—an oft-overlooked but powerful feature. You can write them yourself or ask Quizizz AI to write them for you.

Generate, Transform, Enhance, and Analyze With AI

Quizizz’s new AI integration is a useful digital collaborator, Manning says. When using generative AI in any platform, teachers should “always put eyes” on what it produces to ensure that it’s accurate, appropriate, and aligned with learning objectives; while AI is not going to do everything for you, it can certainly “help you out and get you started.”

Generate and transform: Quizizz AI allows users to generate math word problems, practice worksheets, reading passages with related questions, and lesson plans from scratch. For example, after you provide the AI with the grade, the subject, a brief description, and the topic or standard you’re addressing, it can generate several tailored classroom activity ideas in seconds.

You can also upload an existing resource like a document or PDF and have it quickly transformed into an editable quiz. The same can be done with a publicly accessible YouTube link or website URL as a starting point.

Enhance: After opening up an existing quiz, educators can click the “AI actions” button on each question, allowing them to choose from a number of options like fixing any grammatical errors, replacing the question with a similar one, translating the question into a different language, or converting the question into a real-world scenario. Again, it’s crucial to thoroughly vet and edit any AI enhancements; AI can be unpredictable and make mistakes or change a question’s intent, so it may take multiple attempts to generate something suitable for your needs.

Teachers looking to motivate or delight a class at quiz-time can also prompt the AI to do something more specific. Elementary school students might expect a quiz on fractions, Manning says, but get a Super Bowl–sized surprise when she prompts Quizizz to connect every math question to pop icon Taylor Swift.

Analyze: When students take a quiz, teachers get “an immediate color-coded report that they can quickly glance at and see how the students did per question,” says instructional technology facilitator Crystal Uhiren.

The “Analyze w/ AI” feature takes things one step further, recognizing trends in student performance and highlighting areas where additional support or review could go a long way—insights you can act on immediately. If there is a standard tied to a question that students missed, Uhiren explains, the AI will prompt you to reteach the standard. It's also capable of finer-grained recommendations, privately identifying which students are struggling with particular skills and allowing you to quickly assign additional practice as needed.

Elevate Your Approach to Differentiation

Teachers know that differentiation is hard, as Uhiren points out: “High school students are very perceptive. ‘Why is my work different from everyone else’s? Why do I have to do extra hard work when no one else is?’”

When you’re building an assessment in Quizizz, you can now create different versions. After selecting a quiz to alter, specify the question count and difficulty level for the variant and Quizizz AI will generate the new version. Increase the difficulty in one and level it down in another. You may need to regenerate a few times until the results are a good fit. You can individually assign these assessments within the platform, but every student joins using the same link. “Those kids do not know that they are getting a leveled-up assessment or a more difficult version,” Uhiren explains. “You’re able to differentiate with just a few clicks.”

The same goes for accommodations; Quizizz allows you to create individual profiles for each student and toggle on their accommodations, from granting extra time or reducing the number of answer choices to turning off distracting sound effects or hiding the leaderboard. You only need to set this up once—selections are saved. Each student joins with the same link, but students with accommodations see a version of the assessment tailored to their needs.

“A teacher was using Quizizz in an inclusion class recently—general education students and special education students—and she used the accommodations feature,” Manning told me. “She assigned the quiz and reduced answer choices for the special education students. They still knew the right answer, but instead of processing four choices, now they’re only processing two or three. They were able to get the right answer faster, and now her special education students were making the leaderboard for the first time. That vote of confidence and that motivation propelled them to think, ‘Wow, I can do this.’”

Enhance Existing Lessons

Quizizz isn’t just good for gamified review—it can also be used as an instructional tool. Take presentations made in Google Slides or Canva, import them into the platform, and you can add check-in questions, polls, word clouds, and interactive videos throughout.

“Instead of printing out a stack of maps, I can add an image of a map into my presentation and ask students to identify certain locations or draw patterns of migration,” says high school social studies teacher and instructional tech coach Dana Heller. “Now as I’m lecturing about the Berlin Conference, I can have a map of Africa up in Quizizz and kids can be interacting with it as I’m talking.” And Manning adds that instead of grading 100 exit tickets by hand at the end of your lesson, you can introduce an exit ticket question to the end of your Quizizz lesson and have the platform instantly grade them.

Eager fingers, wandering eyes—tech-integrated lessons can go haywire quickly if students have to click between a number of browser windows, observes instructional technology facilitator Christie Cloud. “It’s just so much easier that you can embed a link or the URL right there in Quizizz,” she says. “As soon as you flip that slide, the website pops up automatically for them. It just saves so much time.” Grigg used to have students load up a PhET simulation in one window, then hop over to another to answer questions in a Google Doc. “It was just back and forth, back and forth,” he says. “But now they have them side by side, and they can just go through and do it all in one shot.”

Empower Students to Take Control of Their Learning

Eighth-grade history teacher Jessica Faubion loves that students can create their own assessments (and flash cards). During a station rotation, she asks one group to build a quiz that will help the class review before taking a unit test.

Some students take the liberty to keep doing this work on their own, she says: “It’s crazy to see, but the kids really enjoy creating those questions.” Students aren’t just passively doing the work they’ve been assigned: “You’re making them think,” Faubion says. “You’re making them create. I think they’re learning more by doing things like that.”