How do Quizzes Bring High-efficiency Teaching?

We, teachers, with our own infinite wisdom, teach and cultivate students. As one of our teachers’ teaching methods, quizzing always plays an important role on teaching. For example, we make quizzes to measure students’ learning performance, improve our teaching strategies and get better teaching effects. There are some quizzes that teachers can make to bring high efficiency on our teaching:

1. Personality quiz — Know more about our students
As we all are aware that knowing the students’ psychology is the premise to perform an excellent teaching scheme. Well, a personality quiz about students’ habits, character, interest, etc. may do a favor for us. By analyzing the test results, we can understand students’ likes and dislikes, to take better and more suitable teaching strategies. On the basis of knowing students, we will have special strategies for - different students when we implement a teaching plan. Then the whole process of teaching scheme may be carried out smoothly.

2. Pre-class quiz — Prepare a good teaching scheme
Usually, making a pre-class quiz for the coming class will be effective for our teachers, especially the new unexperienced teachers. The quiz results will distinctly show us how much students have known about the coming class and how we should prepare a high-quality class with clear primary and secondary teaching plan.

3. After-class quiz — Know the teaching effects
When finishing a class, teachers have to get feedback on the class from students. An after-class quiz will provide great help to our teachers. From the quiz results, we may find students have uneven distribution status on mastering the previous class. The next step we need to do is to summarize our own defects and merits of teaching, making appropriate adjustment on teaching scheme for a more effective class.

4. Funny quiz — Make an attractive class
It is certainly advantageous for students knowing more extracurriculum knowledge, such as the World Cup, famous writers, basketball stars, etc. During class, we teachers consciously integrate some funny quizzes with teaching plan. Because the class is not a simply poor but colorful class with particular attractive content, students will have much more interest in the class.

All the quizzes we referred, personality quiz, pre-class quiz, after-class quiz and funny quiz can be tested in two different forms: paper-based quiz and online quiz.

Normally, we make paper quizzes with many complicated steps: editing questions, typesetting, printing tests, organizing taking tests, collecting and grading quizzes, collecting statistic data and analyzing the results, etc. But for the online quizzes, we can easily build them with professional quiz maker software like Wondershare Quiz Creator. Making online quiz, we just need to create quizzes with multimedia and post them online. Then students will take the online quiz via Internet at anywhere anytime and the system that comes with Quiz Creator can collect the quiz results automatically.

It is such an effective, highly functional and convenient way to conduct almost every test we teachers can imagine, why not we take full use of the quizzes to get more high-quality education?

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Techs and Resources for Water Saving Education

Water, as one of the most important sources for human’s life, is facing a severer and severer situation. It is easy for us to find many tragedies resulting from the water shortage and pollution, so actions need to be taken at once! One of the necessary actions is to raise people’s consciousness of saving and protecting water source. That is to say, we must strengthen the water saving education to which techs and resources will be beneficial. The coming World Water Day on March 22th, 2010 is a good chance to enhance this education.

Five techs for water saving education:

1. Scribus

Scribus is the powerful free software that helps teachers or disseminators create great looking documents of all kinds easily. It is useful to make some interesting and practical educational brochure of water saving and protecting.

2. Ren'Py

Ren'Py is a cross-platform engine that helps users to combine words, pictures, and sounds together to tell stories with the computer. Its easy and efficient script language makes it possible for non-programmers to make visual novels. Teachers can make funny or innovative visual stories about water to kids and students.

3. Zoho Show

It is an online presentation maker, or we can take it as the alternative of PowerPoint. The big advantage is that users can embed the presentation to website by copy and paste the code snippet Zoho provides, which means teachers can create online water slideshows free for students to view at any time.

4. PowerPoint to DVD converter

Brochures are good for the publicity, while active “brochure” may be more vivid. Students may like a brochure that displays like a movie better because it is livelier. It is easy to make such a movie about water with PowerPoint and a PowerPoint to DVD converter.



5. Quiz creator

Make a World Water Day quiz with multimedia, and then let students or any other people take it. Thus, people can learn through interactive tests. Quiz competition can also be hold at schools or communities.

There are many technologies for the education on water saving and protecting. As long as teachers or disseminators use them properly, the techs must be able to work as a great assistant. Apart from the technologies, the teaching materials are the other critical part in water education. Check some authority websites of water knowledge below.

1. http://www.unwater.org/flashindex.html

This plays as the authority site of UN-water, a mechanism in United Nations. The relating statistics, activities and policies can be easily found here.

2. http://www.worldwaterday2010.info/

It is the theme website for the World Water Day 2010 from which we can gain information about the latest situation of water resource and the events relating to water protection in the world.

3. http://water.org/

It is the site of Water.org, an American nonprofit developmental aid organization. This site shows us knowledge about water facts and what we can do to offer the clean water.

4. http://water.usgs.gov/

Here visitors will see the knowledge about water in all rounds like the basic information about water, water use, water pollution and ways to protect water. The feature is that there are specialized materials for education.

5. http://www.kidzone.ws/water/

There are fun facts for kids about the Water Cycle. Photos, activity suggestions and some printable worksheets are offered to visitors.

As reports show, many areas in the world are facing serious water shortage and pollution. Therefore, UN has started World Water Week from September 5th to 11th and World Water Decade from 2005 to 2015, besides of World Water Day. However, as residents of this global village, we must take actions by ourselves in daily life to protect precious water. At the same time the water education needs to be strengthened to raise the public’s sense of water protecting and make more people, especially the young, know the importance and benefits of it.

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