Become a Quiz Wizard with TubeQuizard!

              [Picture Collected from Pixabay]

How many times did you wish to design the perfect grammar quiz but failed miserably? How many times did you want to create a mind-blowing interesting set of grammatical puzzles but ended up making some usual information gap activity?

If you are a teacher, the above-mentioned incidents happened in your life not only once, but multiple times.Teachers and material developers constantly struggle with the task of making meaningful and interesting grammar-based quizzes but in most of the cases they achieve little success. As a result, learners lose interest in learning grammar and it turns out to be a boring and dreadful part of language learning for them. 

However, a magical platform like TubeQuizard can solve this complicated problem for teachers. TubeQuizard with its quiz wizardry can entice learners to quizzes without requiring any sort of invigilation or hard work on the part of the teacher. With TubeQuizard, gone are the tiresome days of struggles! 

What is TubeQuizard?

TubeQuizard is a free online software that gives the users plenty of freedom to choose any video on YouTube of their liking and take a grammar quiz on that. Yes, you read that right. It is a website that uses YouTube videos to help learners understand the complicated rules and functions of grammar. The website offers a range of quizzes on a number of YouTube Videos based on complicated topics, such as- pronouns and determiners, pronunciation, grammar for telling stories, past, present and future tense, verbs, contractions, adjectives so on and so forth. 

What Can be Done on TubeQuizard?

As a user, you can take grammar quizzes on TubeQuizard from a range of videos displayed on the home page. Not only that, if you do not like any of the given videos on the home page, you can search for your own video on YouTube and check for Quizzes. The search engine lets you filter the level, category, variety and type of your search. The search results will show you the quizzes available on the video of your liking and you can take any quiz from there. What could be more fun than doing a grammar quiz while watching your favourite YouTube channel?

Every quiz on this website is created from what the speakers are saying in the videos. Based on the speakers speech, information-gap quizzes are generated. You can listen to the video and at the same time fill in the gap. For every information gap that part of the video is played twice to assist the quiz takers in understanding what is being said. 

While you are writing your answer the video will stop, and if you want to listen to it again you will have to click on the sentence you are working on, then the exact same part of the speech will be played again. While working on your quiz, you can immediately check whether your answer is right or wrong. For good answers you get a positive feedback and for wrong answers you are provided with the right one.

While you are taking the quiz you can enjoy the full video, and occasionally answer to the questions based on the specific grammatical focus. However, if you don't want to watch the full video and would like to focus only on the parts of the information gap and grammar, you can do that by clicking on the sentences and the video will be redirected to the exact point you want. 

There are multiple quizzes on various grammatical functions based on one video, you can choose any of your liking. In addition to that each of the videos clearly mention the target level of language learners and the grammatical focus. It also mentions the genre of the video and whether British or American English has been spoken in the video. It further provides a short description of the grammatical focus or the video itself.

You can also search for videos by words. If you want to learn the pronunciation of a particular word  or the use of a certain verb or tense in different contexts, you can search by that word and a number of videos with quizzes including that word will appear in your search results. You can then modify your search results by selecting different functions of grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. Not only words, you can search by phrases or expressions as well.

You can also create quizzes instantly by searching for a word on the YouTube subtitles search box, and then modify the focus of the quizzes  based on a number of grammar or vocabulary functions. In the following picture you can see the instant quiz that I created based on the past simple and past participle form of verbs. Even after creating the quiz, you can keep modifying it further.

Target Users

TubeQuizard is for both student and teachers. Students can access TubeQuizard without the need of any instructions from the teacher. Teachers can use TubeQuizard to design a number of in-class and outside class activities. TubeQuizard is also open to learners of any age, profession and background. People can use TubeQuizard as a fun online gaming activity as well. However, this website is mainly for students and teachers who can use it as an effective educational resource.

How Can a Language Teacher Use TubeQuizard?

A language teacher can use TubeQuizard in many different ways as this website makes teachers' task of teaching grammar easier. Some of these probable usage are discussed below.

Practice Grammar at Home

The teacher can introduce any grammatical topic in class through classroom activities. Then the teacher can assign that topic to students and tell them to learn more about it and practice it at home on TubeQuizard. 

Flipped Classroom

Also teachers can use TubeQuizard as a resource for a flipped classrom. The teacher can assign a grammatical topic to students and look up its usage on TubeQuizard. In the next class, the teacher can elicit the use of that particular grammatical function and discuss it further. 

Explore a Topic

This can be slightly challenging for students to explore a topic on their own, but at the same time it makes them autonomous (Gruba, Hinkelman & Cárdenas-Claros, 2016, p. 137). Teachers can also use quizzes from TubeQuizard during the lesson as short grammar-based activities. However, in that case the context and available resources are important facts to consider.

Layout, Navigation and Language

TubeQuizard is easy to operate and its neatly organized layout makes it even easier to use it.  It uses easy and limited amount of language so users do not need to struggle to understand how to operate it. Not only that, TubeQuizard does not require a user to log in or sign up. Users can go on using the website as soon as they click on the website link. In addition to that, the tabs of the main functions of the website and multiple filters on the search engine help users to find out the exact resource they are looking for. It is thus easy to navigate and very user-friendly.

Limitations

Amazing quiz-based platforms like TubeQuizard are rare and and hard to find. Although it does not have as elaborate and detailed quiz making and editing functions as Triptico or Kahoot, but TubeQuizard on its own is an exemplary website for learning grammar.  It has a couple of limitations, such as:

1. It has very limited functions for creating quizzes. Simple things like making quizzes, saving them and downloading or embedding them are unavailable. 
2. Also, it does not save a learner's progress, does not show what levels a learner has crossed and does not distinguish between the levels of proficiency clearly. Therefore, learners may keep participating in quizzes and getting scores, but fail to recognize how much progress they have made so far.

How to Use TubeQuizard?

A little bit of training to understand its functions better can help you to uncover the potentials of TubeQuizard to the fullest. TubeQuizard has its limitations but once you learn how to use it in detail, you will not complain much against its limitations anymore. The variety of options it provides, allows a user to practice any grammatical functions with greater efficiency. Here is a well-explained tutorial on TubeQuizard.

Learning Grammar is Fun!

Now may be it is a good time to say learning grammar is fun when you have a great learning companion like TubeQuizard. TubeQuizard helps learners to engage in the learning process without feeling the need of constant help from a teacher. Learners can enjoy, work with videos of their interest, select the grammatical function they want to work on, participate in the quizzes and assess their performance immediately by themselves. 

TubeQuizard does not only help learners to take responsibility of their own learning but also helps them to take control of their entire learning process (Benson, 2006, p. 22). In short, for fun-loving and enthusiastic learners, there can be no better website than TubeQuizard which makes learning fun and enjoyable.

References: 

1. Benson, P. (2007). Autonomy in language teaching and learning. Language Teaching, 40(1), 21-40. Retrieved on 14 February, 2019 from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-teaching/article/autonomy-in-language-teaching-and-learning/7DF3513C76731315FB79C81272553A1F

2. Gruba, P., Hinkelman, D., & Cárdenas-Claros, M. S. (2016). New technologies, blended learning and the ‘flipped classroom’in ELT. The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching, 135-149. Retrieved on 14 February, 2019 from https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=jdUmDAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA135&dq=Gruba,+Hinkelman+%26+C%C3%A1rdenas-Claros,+2016,+p.+137&ots=XKRePh2lXV&sig=VoWvAgKGJayc8ybj82-anOthg_Q#v=onepage&q&f=false