NGPF Fellow Joy Tavano (North Kingstown Senior High School, RI) provides this awesome overview of how to use Quizlet Live. And don't forget, NGPF has a bank of prebuilt Quizlet sets you can use on our Quiz Games Library. 

Name of the Tool: Quizlet Live

Cost: Free when creating random teams; $3 per month to customize teams

Use Case: Quizlet Live is great to use when you want students to work together to learn vocabulary words.

Implementation Guidance:

Quizlet is a great tool for a student to learn and study vocabulary. Essentially a digital flashcard maker, Quizlet allows students to create study sets, search from existing study sets that other users have created, or follow links that you have provided to a study set that you have created. Sign up is required but users can easily sign up with a Google or Facebook account. Once logged in, students can then review flashcards, practice spelling, play a game to match words with definitions, or take a matching quiz. Although this traditional Quizlet implementation is a very effective way for students to study vocabulary, I have found that Quizlet Live is even better.

Quizlet Live is implemented in class. It is a race in which teams compete to choose correct matches to words and their definitions as a team. Each student joins the Quizlet Live with a code that the teacher provides. Once the teacher has chosen the study set to play, the teacher will launch LIVE. The teacher should project his/her screen for the class to see the class code which they will join at quizlet.live. Students are assigned to a team randomly. However, I pay for a Quizlet Teacher account and can assign custom teams. Teams are made up of 2 to 4 players, depending on the size of the class. Students should then move close to their teammates and get ready to start the game.

Once the game has begun, each team member will see the same questions but only one team member will have the correct answer. This forces students to communicate with one another and engage in each other’s answers.  The first team to correctly answer twelve terms, wins.

The game becomes very dynamic for a few reasons. First, students are working together. There is dialog and discussion between team members. Second, I continue to display the leaderboard throughout the game. Teams can see where they stand compared to other teams. Third, one incorrect answer drops the team back to last place. The excitement of potentially losing your high standing makes the game.

I have played this game many times in my personal finance classrooms. Sometimes I let the game pick teams, sometimes I pick teams, and sometimes I let students tell me who they want to work with. I typically allow students to talk to one another, but I have also required that they don’t speak, and only motion to who might have the correct answer. This forces them to really read each other’s screens.

Here are some tips:

Be sure your Quizlet account type setting is set to teacher. Only teacher accounts will see the Live button.

Once one team wins, the game ends for everyone. I find that this sometimes discourages students who just can’t seem to move up the leaderboard fast enough. To remedy this, I read about a tip on the Quizlet Blog where a teacher has students play Quizlet Live 11. Students play until their team gets 11 consecutive correct answers and then stops to wait for others to catch up. I have tried this and found that if students are engaged, it works well.

The feedback from students is very good. Unlike Kahoot, where it can feel that the quickest response is best, Quizlet Live slows students down just enough to really learn the material. They like getting up out of their seats to move to teams and many students love the competition.

Flexible seating is necessary. Teams of 4 students need to be able to sit close enough to see each others screens.

About the Author

Jessica Endlich

When I started working at Next Gen Personal Finance, it's as though my undergraduate degree in finance, followed by ten years as an educator in an NYC public high school, suddenly all made sense.

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