NOT BASEBALL

Friday I saw a presentation on Wooclap which is a quizzing software similar to Quizizz, Kahoot, Poll Everywhere and many others. During the presentation it was impressive to see the number of types of questions supported. There are the multiple choice, essay, fill-in-the blank questions you’d expect. There are locations on pictures that science courses would need. There are numeric questions that allow a tolerance. You could sort or rank responses. I was pretty impressed with the presentation by RF.

Then I started to look at it myself and it has a couple problems that will stop me from using it. First, when you look at the pricing it includes the VAT on the estimate. As you go forward it is backed off but these are computer programmers and other European websites are able to show me a US price accurately. Similarly prices are noted as 83.88$. This is trivial but if the front end is not clean it makes me wonder about the back end. (I’ve quit going to some restaurants figuring if the waitstaff are poorly trained then so are the kitchen staff and that really matters!). Also, the $84 per year plan does not include support (they refer you to FAQ) and does not allow live moderation of student responses on  word clouds and other free response questions. That plan is $180 and is out of my price range. The free plan limits you to two questions per what they call an event. That won’t be useful for me in almost any class setting when I’d use this so I won’t get to try it out with students.

EDIT: Wooclap clarified the moderation: “As for the live moderation of students responses on word clouds, that feature is totally available for any plan including the free one. Any open questions has a direct moderator, the moderator that is not available when you take the $84 plan is a moderator for the wall of messages. Maybe it’s not clear enough in our pricing, we will see how to fix that.”

They also wanted to know where the strange pricing occurred so they could fix it. This is reassuring.

I also tried to experiment with adding questions to PowerPoint. According to their directions I could add my PowerPoint to their site. I did not want to move materials I own to their site without carefully reviewing their license. I could also, supposedly, use and add-in. Either Microsoft or HFC has blocked the ability to add individual add-ins to my type of PowerPoint license, however. So, I couldn’t.

So, all in all this looks pretty cool. But, the limitations on the free plan make it unlikely that I will ever play around enough with this to overcome my qualms about using a paid plan. And this would be a stand alone quiz each time I used it and not integrated with other material. I’ve set a note for myself to check back in a year and see if the free or first tier paid plan has changed in which case I might experiment with it more.