Create your own YouTube Quiz!

To YouTube a lot or to YouTube a little? This is surely the question in today’s media mad world?

In the entirety of entertainment and social media history, YouTube has to be the single greatest social informer, influencer, persuader and educator there has ever been. It could be said that at different points in history television, radio, newspaper and books have all held this highly vaunted position. However, I think it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that YouTube may well have reached a market audience that no other brand of media has ever managed before!

Nowadays, I don’t think there is a teacher or educator who hasn’t used YouTube in one form or another; it might be a science teacher using BBC nature videos to explain the life cycle of a flower or a history teacher using some original footage of the battle of the Somme to better educate their students about trench warfare in the First World War; equally, it could be a Primary School teacher putting on a just dance video on for a class assembly. The point is that YouTube is an incredible tool which can be used to engage and enthuse students in a way few other mediums can.

So bearing all this in mind, I am going to explain one of the ways I have used YouTube to add a powerful research tool to my growing bag of pedagogical gizmos and gadgets.

The Great YouTube Quiz

This year, a number of my colleagues attended a Google educators conference in Nagoya, Japan where they took part in a series of incredibly stimulating and rewarding activities. After they returned from the conference I listened with great eagerness and interest as they explained their experiences using Google Cardboard , creating ‘YouTube choose your own adventure stories’ and playing educational breakout games. It was while I listened to them relate the different activities they had experienced that I started to envisage what a research-based YouTube Quiz might look like.

I have always wanted a medium which would allow students to engage with a topic without being given the resources which pointed them in particular directions. I have also wanted something which gave students the opportunity to locate facts/knowledge about a topic without the intervention of the class teacher; I guess what I really wanted was a way for them to gather the information osmotically (I have always wanted to use that word – yes!). And so I decided to have a go at creating the YouTube Quiz.

Recipe for making a YouTube Quiz (I know this should have been on YouTube as an explanation video but heyho)

Ingredients:

• Explain Everything App

• YouTube account

Steps:

1. Decide what you want your YouTube Quiz to be about. 

2. Use the internet (I would use Google for the search engine) to find the facts for your clues and write them down in a central location i.e. Google Doc/Word Doc/Notes/Post it notes…etc.

3. Open up the Explain Everything App and start with Slide One – I normally have an explanation slide telling the students how the quiz works.

4. Go to slide Two and create your first clue. I usually include a Roman Numeral inspired birthday cake for a person associated with the topic. However this doesn’t always have to be the case!

5. Next keep adding slides for each of your Fact-based clues. Make them interesting by adding images/lines/arrows/sound…etc to the Explain Everything Slideshow.

6. After you have created your slideshow make sure all slides are in the correct order and that there is enough time for each slide to play through (I would give each slide at least 10 seconds to play through).

7. Finally upload your Explain Everything slideshow to YouTube.

And that is how you create an awesome YouTube Quiz.

Final thoughts

I have created three of these YouTube quizzes and they can be time consuming. Each quiz took me over an hour and a half to complete. However, the time it takes to make a YouTube quiz really is worth it as they are an incredible teaching tool for teachers with a passion for student-led learning. My class this year, loved them and would spend huge amounts of time at school (and home) trying to figure out the different facts associated with the different quiz themes. Also, the sheer number of incidental facts and details they picked up by taking part in the quiz was amazing. As a final point, I have included the three YouTube quizzes I created this year. Please feel free to use them if you feel they would be useful. Have a go yourself; it may well be the single greatest thing you ever do…