Facebook Quizzes and Lesson Planning

By heather on July 12, 2009

It used to be 4 colors that defined the differences between personalities: gold, blue, green, and orange. Then it advanced to 8 slices of a pie used to categorize the different intelligences: linguistic, logical, naturalistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, visual/spatial, kinesthetic, musical.  There are also  3 defined learning styles: auditory, visual, and tactile.    

But in the world of Facebook, you are infinitely defined by any thematic quiz you could imagine.  And the way I see it, it’s just the same old, same old personality type quiz…but more tailored to you.   In other words…differentiated.

For instance, according to the Facebook world of personality quizzes, I am the following (like in Jeopardy, try to think of the question that goes with the answer):

Water 

Viola 

A Hobbit

Jean Grey

Prof. Lupin

I have no real idea what all this information really means about me, but it’s a fun way to kill a couple of commercial break minutes during “So You Think You Can Dance,” does it not?

Anyway, all these quizzes got me thinking.  If you are a teacher using a multiple intelligences quiz in your classroom with your students, maybe it would be worthwhile, from a student choice/student ownership point of view, to have students develop their own quizzes of sorts.  Perhaps they can design their own topics of categorization and administer these quizzes to other students?  Would that not add additional ownership towards reflection?

I guess what I’m picturing is students gathering their own information about characters from books they’ve read during the year: traits, internal conflicts, flaws, life themes, skills, etc…and developing some kind of Facebook-esque flowchart that allows fellow students to follow a path towards a given answer.  Then the quiz author must provide a concise paragraph description of that character to distribute to students who qualify as that character.

If I understand it properly, to produce something like this offline, a student might only need index cards to create a flowchart to track answers towards the end.  Online, however, a student might use a program like this one.

I can see the value in this lesson and activity.  It serves as a review of a book or perhaps even covers the standard of Multiple Works By A Single Author.  The creation of the quiz itself is a differentiated assessment of the student who writes it.  It’s a cross-curricular assessment possibility:

Science: What Planet Are You?  (applying science, mythology, and character traits to the planets)

History: Which English Monarch Are You?  Caesar?  Inventor?

Language Arts: Which Book That We’re Read This Year?

Math: Which Algorithm Are You? (assigning traits to different equations as well as understanding the purposes behind their discoveries) 

As I’ve noted before, lessons can come from wacky places.  Keep your ears and eyes open, and you’ll have fresh lessons to start the new year off in an interesting way both for you and your students.