Quizizz has become a staple in classrooms and boardrooms alike. You likely use it for quick formative assessments, engaging review sessions, or perhaps as a fun icebreaker before a meeting. The colorful interface, the memes, and the leaderboards are iconic. But beneath that familiar surface lies a suite of powerful tools that many users—even the veterans—often overlook.
These hidden gems can transform how you teach, train, and track data. They move the platform from a simple “quiz game” to a comprehensive learning management solution. Whether you are a teacher trying to accommodate diverse learning needs or a corporate trainer looking for better engagement analytics, these features are designed to make your life easier.
Let’s dig into the Quizizz toolbox and uncover the features you didn’t know existed, but will soon wonder how you lived without.
1. Audio and Video Responses: Moving Beyond Multiple Choice
Most people associate Quizizz with the standard four-option multiple-choice question. It’s effective, but it doesn’t capture the full spectrum of understanding. One of the most underutilized features is the ability to accept Audio and Video Responses.
Why It Matters
Standard testing often favors students who are good at reading and selecting answers. It doesn’t always show who can articulate a concept verbally. By allowing students to record a short video or audio clip, you open the door for deeper expression.
Practical Applications
- Language Learning: Instead of asking students to translate a word by clicking a box, ask them to record themselves pronouncing a sentence. You can assess accent, fluency, and vocabulary in one go.
- Math Explanations: Ask students to solve a problem on paper, hold it up to the camera, and explain their steps in a video response. This combats the issue of students just guessing the right answer without understanding the process.
- Corporate Pitches: For sales training, ask employees to record a 30-second elevator pitch for a new product.
Pro Tip: Use this sparingly in a long quiz. Grading audio/video responses requires manual review, so mix them in with auto-graded questions to keep your workload manageable.
2. teleporting Questions: The Ultimate Time Saver
Building a quiz from scratch is noble, but it is also time-consuming. You might know you can search for other quizzes, but do you know about the Teleport feature? This allows you to cherry-pick individual questions from the vast public library of millions of quizzes and instantly drop them into your own.
How It Enhances Workflow
You don’t need to copy an entire quiz just to get the three good questions from it. You can open the Teleport search bar while editing your quiz, search for a topic like “Photosynthesis” or “Agile Methodology,” and browse through thousands of questions.
The “Frankenstein” Method
- Search for your topic.
- Scroll through results and click “Add” on just the specific questions you like.
- Combine questions from five different creators to build the perfect assessment for your specific needs.
This ensures your quiz is tailored exactly to what you taught, without the hassle of typing out every single question and answer option manually.
3. Lesson Mode: It’s Not Just for Quizzes
The name “Quizizz” implies quizzing, but the Lesson Mode (formerly known as Instructor-Led Lessons) turns the platform into a full presentation tool, rivaling PowerPoint or Google Slides, but with interactivity baked in.
Breaking the Lecture Monotony
In a standard presentation, you talk for 20 minutes and hope people are listening. In a Quizizz Lesson, slides and questions are mixed together. You present a concept on two slides, and the very next slide is a poll or a quiz question about what you just said.
Key Capabilities
- Import Slides: You don’t have to rebuild everything. You can import your existing Google Slides or PDFs directly into Quizizz.
- Live Feedback: As soon as you hit a question slide, every participant’s device changes from a passive screen to an input device. You get instant data on who is following along.
- Student-Paced Option: You can assign a Lesson as homework. Students review the slides and answer questions at their own pace, making it perfect for flipped classrooms or asynchronous corporate training.
4. Spin the Wheel: gamifying Selection
Sometimes you need to pick a student to answer a question, or choose a lucky winner for a prize, but you want to keep it within the Quizizz ecosystem. The Spin the Wheel feature is a simple yet delightful addition to the instructor dashboard.
Improving Classroom Management
Random selection is fair selection. When you are running a live quiz and want to pause for a discussion, you can use the wheel to randomly select a participant.
Application Ideas
- “Hot Seat” Questions: Pause the quiz. Spin the wheel. The selected student has to explain why the previous answer was correct.
- Prize Giveaways: In a corporate town hall, use the wheel to pick a winner for a gift card among the participants who joined the session.
This feature maintains the high energy of the platform even during the pauses between questions.
5. Redemption Questions: A Second Chance at Learning
Failure shouldn’t be the end of the road. One of the most pedagogically sound features in Quizizz is Redemption Questions. This feature allows students to re-attempt questions they got wrong earlier in the quiz.
The Psychology of Redemption
When a student gets a question wrong, they often feel defeated. Redemption questions pop up near the end of the game, offering a chance to boost their score. This forces the student to recall the correct answer they likely saw during the review of their mistake.
Why It’s Effective
It reinforces learning through repetition and immediate correction. It shifts the focus from “testing” to “mastery.” It teaches students that mistakes are just opportunities to try again.
Note: This is an optional setting. You can toggle it on or off depending on whether you are doing a low-stakes review (keep it on) or a strict assessment (turn it off).
6. Draw It Questions: Unleashing Creativity
Multiple choice limits thinking to pre-defined boxes. The Draw It question type removes those boxes entirely. Participants are given a blank canvas (or an image you upload) and drawing tools to mark up the screen.
Visualizing Understanding
- Geography: Upload a blank map and ask students to “Circle the location of the Nile River.”
- Anatomy: “Draw an arrow pointing to the Femur.”
- Chemistry: “Draw the molecular structure of water.”
- Corporate Strategy: “Circle the area on this graph where we saw the biggest dip in Q3 sales.”
This feature is particularly powerful for tablet users, but works perfectly fine with a mouse or trackpad. It engages the spatial and visual centers of the brain, providing a nice break from text-heavy questions.
7. Focus Mode: Curbing Distractions
One of the biggest challenges with online assessments is integrity. How do you know the participant isn’t just Googling the answer in another tab? Focus Mode is Quizizz’s answer to tab-switching.
How It Works
When Focus Mode is enabled, Quizizz detects if a participant switches tabs or exits the full-screen mode. It notifies the instructor immediately and can even pause the quiz for that student.
Use Cases
- High-Stakes Testing: Use this for mid-terms or certification exams where integrity is paramount.
- Accountability: Even knowing the feature is active acts as a psychological deterrent against cheating.
It isn’t as invasive as proctoring software that records webcams, making it a “light” version of security that respects privacy while discouraging distraction.
8. Paper Mode: No Devices? No Problem.
The digital divide is real. Not every classroom or training room has 1:1 devices. Or perhaps the Wi-Fi is down. Paper Mode is a brilliant solution that blends digital tracking with analog inputs.
The Magic of Q-Cards
In Paper Mode, the teacher projects the question on the main screen. Students hold up a printed piece of paper (a Q-Card) that resembles a QR code. The orientation of the paper determines their answer (A, B, C, or D).
The teacher then scans the room using the Quizizz app on their phone. The app instantly recognizes all the cards, records the answers, and logs the data into the system.
Benefits
- Zero Student Devices Needed: Only the teacher needs a smartphone.
- Instant Grading: You still get all the analytics and reports of a digital quiz without the hardware headache.
- Engagement: It gets students looking up and interacting rather than staring down at screens.
9. Bulk Import from Spreadsheets
For the power users who have hundreds of questions stored in Excel or Google Sheets, the thought of manually entering them into Quizizz is a nightmare. The Spreadsheet Import feature solves this.
Quizizz provides a template. You paste your questions, answer options, and time limits into the designated columns. Then, you upload the file. In seconds, you have a fully formed quiz with 50+ questions ready to go.
Workflow Efficiency
This is ideal for converting old question banks from other LMS platforms or textbook publishers into engaging Quizizz games. It’s a massive productivity hack for department heads or curriculum designers.
Conclusion
Quizizz is often pigeonholed as a simple gamification tool, but as these features demonstrate, it is a robust platform capable of handling complex learning scenarios. From the inclusivity of Audio Responses and Paper Mode to the productivity of Teleporting and Spreadsheet Imports, there is likely a tool here that solves a problem you face daily.
The next time you log in, don’t just hit “Create Quiz.” Explore these hidden corners of the dashboard. Try a “Draw It” question. Run a session in “Paper Mode.” By leveraging these lesser-known features, you can keep your content fresh, your data accurate, and your audience—whether they are 15 years old or 50—fully engaged.
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