McKinnon Secondary College
Note: Creating activities using the Quia site requires subscription membership. Activities at the Quia site can be accessed at no charge by students. If you are interested in creating your own activities for students you can try Quia out on a 30-day trial, after which time your activities are wiped.
Click here to go to the Quia website. "Instructor Zone" is where you go to login and create/edit your activities.
Quia is a wonderful, simple-to-use Web-based facility with which you can create interactive games for your students to use. You don’t need to know anything about the computer language through which your words data are managed, nor do you need to know how html and webpages work. All you need is the ability to type words into boxes using your keyboard! The site gives clear, jargon-free instructions at every step of the way. When you’ve created an activity it gives you a URL (web address) which you should record, in order for your students to be able to reach your activity.
Available activity types include:
• 1 Games: subdivided into four activities (all generated simultaneously for you):
(a) Flashcards - shows students the top of a ‘virtual’ card with a random expression on it - another click gives the translation or definition. The student can keep it in the pack if he/she needs to practise it again or take it out if it is already known. This activity allows students to independently introduce themselves to the vocab involved.
(b) Matching, where students identify matching pairs, which are displayed simultaneously, eg platypus/monotreme, or Sofia/Bulgaria.
(c) Concentration, where students have to remember the position of cards to do the matching.
(d) Word Search
Click here to play a sample group of Games (on Australian capital cities).
• 2 Jumbled words (eg ym aemn si etpre)
• 3 Pop-ups. You produce a sentence which has a gap in it; students click on an arrow next to the gap and up pops a list of alternatives from which to choose. Click here to play a sample Pop-ups game.
• 4 Challenge board. Quiz questions, of varying points value, which can be played solo, or by two students competing against each other.
• 5 Basic multiple choice quiz
• 6 Hangman. Just what it says. This is great; it allows teachers of French, German and Spanish to provide clickable Umlauts, accents etc. and allows you to provide a hint if wished. Click here to play a sample Hangman game.
Registering as a new user is simple. Go to <www.quia.com>. Just give yourself whatever username you wish (the conventional form of your name is fine), then give yourself a password, and off you go! When you have typed in the words or phrases or questions which you want to make up the activity, click on "Submit" and note the URL it gives you.
There is an Activity Directory, containing lists of activities for several languages, which their creators have chosen to make Netizens aware of.
If you don't know how to make webpages and you want a simple way of providing your students (whether they’re in a computer lab or in a room containing two computers) with one-click access to your activities, you could use Microsoft Word 97 (or later) to type up an index of them, containing their titles and their URLs. The URLs will automatically become live links if the computer is connected to the Internet. To avoid students altering your Word document, ask someone in your school to show you how to make the document "Read Only". If you wish to run the document across a network, get your school’s computer guru to allow more than one user access to it at a time.
- D. Nutting