Before COVID-19 moved us all online, Zoom was a platform that many people weren’t familiar with. If you didn’t operate an online business, you probably weren’t used to Zoom meetings.
And then the coronavirus lockdown made Zoom a star.
All of a sudden, it seems like every in-person event is being held on Zoom—from business meetings to math, cooking, and dance classes, to doctor’s appointments. Even playdates and weekly visits with grandparents occur on Zoom. The newfound popularity of the Zoom platform has revolutionized how people communicate with one another.
It’s also given rise to the Zoom quiz. So, in this post, we’ll discuss how you can create and host a Zoom quiz, specifically with Interact.
We’ll focus on:
- A basic introduction to Zoom (in case you haven’t used it yet)
- What a Zoom quiz is
- When you should create a Zoom quiz
- How to create and host your Zoom quiz
By the time we’re finished, you’ll be ready to host a Zoom quiz of your own!
What Is Zoom?
Zoom is a video-conferencing platform that allows people to talk no matter where they are. While this doesn’t seem all that unique or different, it is. Zoom makes easy-to-use, cloud-based video-conferencing accessible to everyone.
Video-conferencing isn’t a new concept. In fact, the first video conference happened in 1964. While these early attempts required a device specifically made for video-conferencing (which wasn’t practical for most people), computer-based video-conferencing became available in the 1990s. Skype started in 2003, bringing the general public the ability to talk to people face-to-face over a distance. As more competitors entered the market, video-conferencing grew in popularity.
Zoom entered the video-conferencing market in 2013, and even then, it stood out. It was cloud-based, quick, and it easily worked across different operating systems. The engineers who created Zoom made sure it was done well.
Most importantly though, Zoom works, so people want to use it. Some of the reasons people love it include:
- It’s easy to set up for users
- It’s got excellent features
- It has a great price point
Zoom is easy to use
When you first sign up for Zoom, you might worry about a learning curve. That couldn’t be further from necessary. If you can set up an appointment in a calendar app, you can schedule a Zoom call. And to invite others to your Zoom meeting, all you have to do is send them a link.
When it’s time for your meeting, log in to Zoom, click on the meeting link, and let your guests in. Once the meeting gets started, you can access Zoom’s features to make your meeting great.
Zoom makes it easy for participants to join a meeting. Your meeting guests can click on the link and access Zoom on their computer, the app on their phone, or even call in to join in for the audio. Zoom is convenient and simple to use for the host and guests.
Zoom’s features
Zoom has several features that people love to use. You can easily share your screen with guests during a meeting. You can share your entire screen, a specific window, a part of the screen, audio, a specific file, an iPad/iPhone, or use the computer as a whiteboard. With any of these options, you can annotate over the screen to highlight or add extra information. You can let your guests share their screens as well.
Another great feature is the ability to record your Zoom meetings. You can choose to record the entire meeting or a specific part. Once the meeting is concluded, Zoom saves the recording to your local computer (or the cloud with a paid account). You can then access the recordings as videos or audio files.
At the start of the pandemic, Zoom experienced several public security and privacy failures. They’ve since made updates, including password-protected meetings, two-factor authentication, and end-to-end encryption of the meetings. While these updates haven’t completely solved the security issues they’ve struggled with, Zoom is making significant advances in this area.
Zoom’s price point
For many people, Zoom is free! You can host a 40-minute meeting for up to 100 people on the free plan, and there’s no time limit for one-on-one meetings. The free plan works well for personal users and sole-proprietor businesses and includes many of the features that the paid plan has. If you do need longer large-group meetings, the paid plans start at $14.99 a month.
Zoom COVID-19 growth
While Zoom was quite popular with solo-entrepreneurs and small business owners before the lockdown, it has taken off in 2020. According to CNBC, Zoom grew from 10,000,000 daily users in December 2019 to over 200,000,000 daily users by March 2020. The numbers continue to rise.
Whether it’s a math class, your neighborhood book club, a business meeting, or a friend’s baby shower, you’ve probably been invited to at least one Zoom call recently. And every single one of these situations would be made better with a Zoom quiz!
What’s a Zoom quiz?
Before you create a Zoom quiz, you should know what one is. To put it simply, a Zoom quiz is a quiz that’s administered over Zoom, where meeting attendees answer the questions remotely.
There are many ways that people can answer questions in a Zoom quiz. For example, they can:
- Write answers on paper or a whiteboard
- Post answers to everyone in the Zoom chat box
- Answer orally within the group
- Send or text answers to the meeting host privately
The topic of your Zoom quiz is completely up to you. Maybe you want to create a trivia quiz to use with your friends or a business quiz or survey to use with your team. You can even create an educational quiz to use with your students. The possibilities are endless!
When should you use a Zoom quiz?
There are so many ways that you can use a Zoom quiz. The below three ways are my favorites! You can use a Zoom quiz for business, for educational purposes, and for social settings. The quiz will make your Zoom more engaging and interactive, which is absolutely essential when you’re meeting virtually.
Let’s look at each of these purposes more closely.
Zoom quizzes for businesses
Businesses often need input from their employees and their customers, and quizzes built with Interact make this simple. You simply send your stakeholders the link to the quiz, and they take it. That’s it. You’re done.
But what if you want more insight than a multiple-choice quiz provides?
In an office, you could follow up after a quiz by bringing up specific answers in a meeting or pop into someone’s office to have a conversation. You could also send emails to get clarification, but that can be very time-consuming.
A Zoom quiz eliminates all of that extra follow-up time. You can invite your group to a Zoom, administer the quiz inside Zoom, and discuss the answers right there. Since it’s quite easy to set up Zoom meetings, you can invite different groups of people to specific Zooms to get their insights. Using breakout rooms, you can even run multiple groups at the same time to provide a more intimate experience for attendees.
For example, let’s say you run a company with 20 employees and you want to get their thoughts on new product releases for next year. You could invite them all to a Zoom session to discuss, but you wouldn’t be able to hear from everyone or keep the group engaged for the whole session.
Instead, you could create a quiz covering the new product releases. If you have prototypes, use quiz questions with images and have attendees choose which ones they prefer. Since your employees all have different roles within the company, you might put them into breakout sessions by department to discuss things as a group. You can even have the team leader record the breakout session if you want more insight. (Sidenote: It’s a good idea to let people know they’re being recorded! 😀)
Within those breakout sessions, you could also include survey questions on topics relevant to each group’s role within the company. You could choose to create individual quizzes for each group or use conditional logic to show different questions to different groups.
Another Zoom quiz option for businesses is a focus group. These groups are an excellent way to gather data about what people think of your company. There could be a focus group for satisfied customers or potential customers. You might even choose to have a focus group of unsatisfied customers to find out what went wrong.
You probably don’t want to schedule that last group all that often, because it’s not necessarily a positive experience for the business owner. While constructive criticism can be an excellent source for improvement, too many of those sessions can make a business owner really sad.
No matter who you invite to your Zoom focus group, you can create a Zoom quiz to use a general outline for the discussion. If you ask attendees to chat their answers, you can save the chat to access after the session. The great thing about the Zoom chat feature is there is a lot of flexibility on how you set up and save chats.
Again, after you ask quiz questions, you can dedicate time to discussing people’s answers. This is an excellent way to get extra information in one sitting instead of having to follow up with each person individually.
Remember, though, to be mindful of the individuals who are giving their time to help you with your business. When you send the Zoom invitation, explain the purpose of your session. Give clear expectations about how long the session will take, their participation, and what you hope to gain from the session. When people are clear on what they’re volunteering for, they’re a lot more likely to show up and participate.
Zoom quizzes for education
Before we get into using Zoom quizzes for education, I want to point out how you should NOT use them. I would not recommend a Zoom quiz in a group setting as a formal multiple-choice student assessment. There are concerns about answer validity and student confidentiality because of the remote group setting.
However, there are several ways to use Zoom quizzes to help your students learn. Some ways Zoom quizzes can help with virtual learning include:
- Building community among your virtual students
- Reviewing concepts
- Providing alternate assessment methods
Building community
One of the biggest challenges of distance education, particularly for younger students, is the loss of school community. When younger students don’t regularly spend significant time in the classroom with their teacher and peers, it’s hard for them to feel connected to the group. This can lead to feelings of isolation and disinterest in education.
Teachers have to be creative in how they connect with their students and how they connect their students to one another. A fun Zoom quiz is a great tool to keep students connected! Teachers can create a personality quiz that asks students questions about their lives. The students could write their answers on a whiteboard to show the class and share their thoughts orally.
Depending on the age of the students, you can even use breakout rooms to provide small-group settings for student discussions. Of course, each age and group of students is different, so it’s an important consideration. Younger students need to be fully supervised and cannot stay focused for long periods. Older students can spend significantly more time in a meeting and complete longer Zoom quizzes.
Reviewing concepts
There are quite a few ways for teachers to review concepts in collaborative Zoom sessions. Assessment quizzes—where teachers set correct and incorrect answers with explanations—are the best option for reviews. Teachers can expand on and discuss answers after each quiz question to correct student misconceptions.
Teachers can also use Zoom assessment quizzes at the beginning of a unit of study. Students can write answers on a sheet of paper to demonstrate what they already know about a concept. At the conclusion of the unit, teachers can readminister the Zoom quiz to see what students have learned. If using a quiz at the beginning of a unit, don’t share the correct answers then with the students; they’ll learn the information during the unit, and they can analyze their answers when the unit is complete.
Zoom assessment quizzes are also a great tool to review material and prepare for exams. During a review session, teachers can use a quiz in a whole-class setting or with small groups. Students can text their answers or vote on which answer they think is correct. Teachers can discuss with students why each answer is correct and provide additional information or explanation. The data collected from quiz results can also help teachers determine future lesson plans and subject focus.
Providing alternate assessment methods
This is, by far, my favorite way to use Zoom quizzes for educational purposes! While you should not use Zoom quizzes for a multiple-choice assessment of your students’ knowledge, you can definitely use the Zoom setting to assess student-created quizzes. Having students create quiz questions and answer choices over a topic is a great way to assess their learning without giving them a quiz.
While younger students would struggle to create a full quiz, students in middle school or older would be able to do this with no problem. Be sure to provide an extensive rubric of what you’re looking for in the quiz, like quiz length, topics that students need to include, and any other criterion that’s important for student success.
Once the students have created their quizzes, have them share and take one another’s quizzes during Zoom sessions. This serves a dual purpose because teachers can grade student quizzes at the same time that students are reviewing material by taking their classmates’ quizzes. As you are going through each quiz, be sure to correct any misinformation. It’s important to make sure that students learn the right thing.
Zoom quizzes for social purposes
It’s essential to remember that Zoom is social. It gives us an opportunity to see and interact with people when we can’t physically be with them. And, right now, social interactions are exactly what we need.
Zoom quizzes can add an extra element of fun to these social interactions. Below are a few examples of how Zoom quizzes can make video-conferencing more fun.
Quiz nights
Before COVID-19, pub trivia nights were popular in many cities. People would gather at the local bar to have fun and answer trivia questions. Sometimes there were prizes, but, for many, the bragging rights were enough to make it a great evening.
Due to city ordinances to slow the spread of the coronavirus, pub quizzes aren’t happening in person right now. So, trivia fans can host a virtual pub quiz instead. During these pub quizzes, a quizmaster creates a quiz and hosts the Zoom meeting. It might be a general knowledge quiz or a theme trivia night. The quizmaster then uses the Zoom feature to share their screen and show the quiz questions. Contestants answer trivia questions on a whiteboard, on paper, or through the chat feature in Zoom. The person who gets the most questions correct wins.
You can even divide your quiz into different rounds to make it especially exciting. You might have a picture round where you share different images and people answer questions about the images. It could be artwork where they have to identify the artist. You could add pictures of celebrities and have them select the names of movies they’ve been in.
You might have a music round where you share small segments of songs and your guests have to name the song or artist. Use a custom playlist in an app like Spotify. With Zoom, you can keep your open personal tabs private by only sharing the quiz tab.
Someone within the group can share the quiz and the group can answer the questions together. Use Zoom breakout rooms if you want to have teams.
Sure, since people will be at their devices, they can easily Google the questions, but remember that the main goal is to interact and have fun.
Celebrations
People have become especially creative in how they’re celebrating important events right now. Whether it’s a wedding, birthday, or baby shower, virtual celebrations have become a viable option. People have gotten innovative, changing popular party activities for these virtual gatherings. A Zoom quiz works perfectly for any of these situations.
The host can create a quiz all about the guest of honor for attendees to answer during the video call. If it’s a birthday party, the questions might focus on the likes, dislikes, and important events of the person whose birthday it is. If it’s a wedding or bridal shower, there might be a quiz about the happy couple and trivia related to them. With a baby shower, the quiz questions could focus on the mother-to-be, the new arrival, or general knowledge about babies or parenting.
The more creative the questions are and the more the guests can interact, the more fun the Zoom quiz will be!
Casual get-togethers
I’m not sure if you can classify a Zoom call as a get-together since no one is actually getting together, but there are times that people gather simply because they want to be in each other’s company. A host could invite extended family members or just a close group of friends. For now, many of these groups are meeting virtually.
While people often enjoy an unstructured opportunity to chat, a quiz can be a different way to encourage conversation within these groups. You could host a “kids vs. adults” quiz night for your neighborhood, a girls-night-in with a themed quiz about favorite movies or celebrity news, or you could play a version of The Newlywed Game with the couples in your extended family.
Until we can safely meet in person, these online social gatherings are an excellent way to get people talking and laughing. A Zoom quiz will encourage interaction within your group.
Now that you know different ways to use a Zoom quiz, let’s look at how to set one up.
How do you set up a Zoom quiz?
There are two parts to setting up a successful Zoom quiz. The first part is creating the quiz for your Zoom call. The second part is hosting the Zoom call for your quiz.
Creating your quiz
No matter what type of quiz you’re creating, the general process is the same. Begin by selecting the platform where you want to build your quiz. You could create it in PowerPoint or Google Slides, or you could use a quiz platform like Interact. If you’re planning to allow others to answer the quiz questions, I strongly recommend using the quiz platform. The platform will automatically score the quiz, which makes it easy to determine a winner if you’re hosting a competition.
Since you’re on the Interact website, you might have guessed that I’m going to show you how to create a quiz with Interact. (You’re smart like that!)
Inside the Interact dashboard, choose “Create a Quiz” in the top right corner. Next, decide if you want to make your quiz from scratch or use a template. For your first quizzes, I recommend using a template. There are tons of options that will fit perfectly with myriad topics. For example, there are templates for business quizzes, education quizzes, and social quizzes with topics like entertainment. Interact has tons of other templates that you can customize however you want, so be sure to check them all out!
After you’ve chosen a quiz template, start editing the quiz. First, make sure you have the right type of quiz. For example, your template might be a personality quiz but you need a scored quiz. You can change that at the bottom left of your quiz. Once you confirm that you want to switch the quiz type, you can start customizing the quiz.
To customize your quiz, you can change the quiz cover, switch the quiz results, and add the questions you want to include. If you’re creating a trivia quiz, we’ve got a post of trivia questions that you might want to use on a variety of subjects. I know you’ll find some great ones!
If you need help creating your quiz, check out these posts:
·How to Make an Interactive Quiz
·How to Make a Personality Quiz
·How to Ask Better Questions
·How to Write Quiz Results
Note: Unless you want quiz-takers to take the quiz online and connect their score with their email address, you do NOT need to create an opt-in form for your quiz.
Once you’ve created your quiz, you’re ready to invite your people and host your Zoom quiz.
Hosting your Zoom quiz
It only takes a few minutes to get ready for your Zoom quiz. Make sure you’ve signed up for your free (or paid) Zoom account. After you’ve signed in, click “Schedule a Meeting” at the top right.Then choose the date and time when you want to host your meeting.
It’s a good idea to invite people to the Zoom session a few days before the scheduled meeting. When you’re scheduling the meeting, you can also adjust privacy and other settings.
While some of the settings are on the Schedule a Meeting page, you can find many of the other settings under “Settings” at the left. For example, breakout rooms can be enabled under In-Meeting (Advanced) settings. Other settings you might want to change are those related to screen sharing and annotation.
Once you have the meeting all set up, you can invite your guests. There is a default invitation you can use, or you can create your own invitation and include the Zoom link. I underlined the meeting link so you know what to use in your invitation.
When it’s time for your Zoom quiz, all your guests need to do is join the Zoom meeting and you can get started. You can share your quiz through the screen-sharing options at the bottom of the Zoom screen.
When you share your screen within the Zoom call, you can choose which tab you want to share. Notice how it shows all the open windows on my computer and I can share the one that has the quiz in it. You can then do whatever you need in the background to create the quiz experience that you want. Maybe you want to add an audio timer to build urgency or clapping. You can keep your Spotify playlist open for the music round. It’s even possible to have YouTube open for audio clips from movies. Your Zoom guests will be amazed at your new Zoom skills!
That’s all there is to making a Zoom quiz. We’ve discussed:
- A basic introduction to Zoom
- What a Zoom quiz is
- When you should create a Zoom quiz
- How to create and host your Zoom quiz
Whether your quiz is for business, education, or social purposes, you’re now ready to make a Zoom quiz of your own.
Be sure to let us know how it goes!