Datalogics, the premier source for PDF and eBook technologies for developers, recently announced the availability of Active Textbook, an eBook platform for the education market. Active Textbook provides a powerful platform that enables educators to bring interactive content into a student’s hands.
Quizzes are a typical part of any classroom. But now with Active Textbook, quizzes can be made available right in the book for students to interact with as they are reading!
Want to know how to get started with creating interactive quizzes in Active Textbook? Let’s take a look at what Active Textbook can do:
The quiz feature is an interactive overlay (an overlay is an object added to books in Active Textbook) that is created in a book. It allows quizzes to be strategically placed in the book, whether at the end of the chapter or right in the middle. It’s a great resource for engaging the reader to make sure they are following along.
To begin, a resource must be made available for all students to see. This can either be done by setting the book public for all to see or creating a group with each student added to it. This group would then be assigned a book that is normally private or restricted. For our purposes, this blog assumes that the groups and the book permissions have already been set.
The next step is to open the book and go to the page where you are intending to place your quiz. In my example, I will put a quiz on the first page. A quiz overlay must be placed on a word or a group of words. After making your text selection, a context menu will appear. At this point you can click “Create Overlay.”
Clicking “Create Overlay” will open a new window that will allow you to select from a variety of overlays that can be created. We need to select the “Quiz” overlay.
Once you click “Quiz,” it will immediately change the window and go into the quiz creation process.
The first box is a quiz title. This should be something that’s informative and useful to the subject at hand. For our purposes, we will make the quiz available all the time, but it is possible to have the quiz only available for a set period of time. This feature is useful in the event that the group or students must complete the quiz in the time frame to keep up with the material. It is also possible to allow students to retake the quiz by limiting the amount of retakes or setting it to unlimited retakes. There are also options to allow for a time limit and to reveal the correct answers after a quiz has been taken. Once we are done with this page, click on “Create Questions” to move to the next part of quiz creation.
You will then be guided through creating each question for the quiz. There are four types of quiz styles that can be selected:
- Multiple choice (single answer)
- Multiple choice (multiple answer)
- Short answer
We are going to create a multiple choice quiz, so in the “Question Type:” field select “Multiple choice (multiple answer)” from the drop down menu. A button will appear that will allow you to add as many choices as you want to this quiz. You are not limited to a maximum amount of answers so you could potentially have a significant amount of choices if you really wanted to throw your students for a loop!
For our quiz, I have three choices that the quiz taker could select. Fill out each. One is expected to have the correct answer while the other two are to contain a wrong answer. Click the check box to the left of the field that contains the correct answer so that the system knows which is the right one. It is possible to add more questions by clicking the “Add Question” button if you want a multi-question quiz. Once done, click the “Create” button to create the quiz.
Once the quiz has been created it will take you back to the book itself. The word or group of words that you previously had selected will now have a highlight over it and an indicator off to the side of the page.
At this point it is time to take your own quiz! You can either click the red highlight or the icon off to the right. Both will open the quiz dialog.
But what if the answer was wrong? Well, the window changes to reflect that scenario.
In our example when setting up the quiz originally, we selected the option to show the correct answer in the event the quiz answer was wrong. This can be seen above. It is possible to not allow this if that is what you desire.
To modify an existing quiz, select the overlay menu on the left hand menu column. The icon has a music note, letter and an art image in it. Open it up and the first item that displays will be the quiz you created. This will allow you to modify existing settings or to even delete the quiz.
In a classroom setting, it may be necessary for a teacher to see quiz results. However, this does require administrator privileges. In the admin console, under “User Activities” on the top menu, there is a drop down item called “User Test Results Report.”
In this view, it is possible to see all the results from quizzes that have been taken on the system. If there are a lot of items here, it is possible filter to your specific quiz that you created.
Click the “Filter” button once your selection has been made and you’ll see each user’s attempt at taking your quiz with their score.
It is also possible to export these results in a CSV file for ease of use in other ways.
Creating a quiz is only one of the many ways in which Active Textbook can work for you. Explore and see all the possibilities! Happy quiz making!
We are very excited to be working with our technology partner, Evident Point, the creator of the Active Textbook platform, in providing a leading edge end-to-end solution for your eBook educational needs. Interested in setting up your own Active Textbook server or just have a few questions? Just fill out our evaluation form.