Assess with less stress: 3 ways to simplify back-to-school with video quizzes

The beginning of a new school year is exciting—but it can also be hectic. Across K-20 classrooms, educators are juggling establishing classroom routines, reviewing foundational concepts, and building connections with new students. One easy, engaging tool to simplify these essential tasks right from day one is interactive video quizzes.

In this post, we’ll highlight three easy, practical ways K12 teachers can use video quizzes to jumpstart their school year, and three tailored ideas specifically for higher education faculty. No matter which group of learners you teach, you’ll find strategies here to streamline your back-to-school planning, boost student engagement, and create an interactive learning environment that sets everyone up for success.

3 ways K12 teachers can jumpstart the school year with video quizzes

1. Teach classroom routines interactively

Communicating classroom routines early sets the stage for a successful school year. Instead of repeatedly explaining rules and procedures, create a short video quiz highlighting your classroom expectations. Embed questions throughout the video to confirm students understand key points—like turning in assignments, daily schedules, or behavioral guidelines.

• Benefit to students: Interactive quizzes help students actively engage with and internalize important routines, ensuring they’re comfortable and confident from day one.
• Benefit to educators: Spend less class time reviewing procedures, quickly identify misunderstandings, and get everyone on the same page early.

2. Quickly assess summer learning retention

Wondering how much your students remember from last year? Video quizzes make it easy to check their understanding without stress or pressure. Create or choose short review videos on foundational concepts, then embed multiple-choice, true/false, or short-answer questions to assess student retention.

• Benefit to students: This low-stakes, engaging activity gives students a comfortable way to refresh their knowledge and highlights areas they might need to revisit.
• Benefit to educators: Immediately spot learning gaps or strengths, allowing you to plan targeted instruction right from the start of the school year.

3. Build connections with interactive “Get-to-Know-You” activities

Building strong classroom communities starts with understanding your students. With video quizzes, you can turn typical “get-to-know-you” surveys into engaging, interactive experiences. Create a friendly welcome video and add poll, short-answer, or rating questions to learn more about your students’ interests, preferences, and learning styles.

• Benefit to students: Encourages students to feel seen, valued, and welcome, fostering a sense of belonging from the first day of school.
• Benefit to educators: Efficiently gather meaningful information about each student, making it easy to personalize instruction, differentiate learning, and build stronger relationships.

3 ways faculty can start the semester right with video quizzes

1. Set clear expectations with interactive syllabus activities

Every semester starts with syllabus questions—and often repeated ones. This year, proactively clarify expectations by embedding video quizzes directly into your syllabus overview videos. Highlight key course policies, grading criteria, and assignment deadlines, and add short, interactive questions to confirm student comprehension.

• Benefit to students: Clearly understand course structure, expectations, and requirements from the outset, boosting confidence and preparedness.
• Benefit to educators: Significantly reduce the volume of repetitive questions and confusion throughout the semester, freeing up valuable class time for deeper learning.

2. Conduct pre-class checks for understanding

When students come to class already familiar with core concepts, the learning experience improves dramatically. With video quizzes, you can easily turn brief, pre-recorded lecture content into engaging formative assessments. Students watch videos ahead of class and respond to embedded quiz questions that check their comprehension of key ideas.

• Benefit to students: Encourages deeper preparation, active engagement, and thoughtful participation during class sessions.
• Benefit to educators: Quickly pinpoint student understanding or misconceptions before class, allowing you to adjust your instruction and maximize the effectiveness of classroom discussions and activities.

3. Build community with meaningful icebreaker activities

Creating a connected learning community is essential—especially in higher education settings, where students may initially feel disconnected or isolated. Video quizzes offer a friendly, easy way to break the ice. Embed engaging poll questions or short-answer prompts in an introductory video to learn more about your students’ backgrounds, interests, academic goals, and learning preferences.

• Benefit to students: Helps students feel welcomed, builds peer connections quickly, and fosters a sense of community and belonging.
• Benefit to educators: Easily collect actionable insights about your students, helping you personalize future instruction, support student success, and create a more engaging classroom environment.

How ScreenPal simplifies video quizzing for busy educators

If the idea of adding interactive video quizzes sounds appealing—but time-consuming—ScreenPal makes the process easy. Our platform is designed specifically for educators, offering a simple, intuitive way to create quizzes directly from any video, including YouTube content. With ScreenPal, you can:

• Choose from five flexible question types: multiple choice, true/false, short answer, polls, and ratings.
• Securely share quizzes with a link or QR code, or embed directly in your LMS.
• Automatically score and sync results with your LMS gradebook, making assessment quick and effortless.
• Easily provide feedback to students and access downloadable reports on individual and overall performance.

By simplifying quiz creation, scoring, and analysis, ScreenPal seamlessly fits into your existing workflows—saving you valuable preparation time and helping you engage students right from day one.

How to create a video quiz with ScreenPal

Turning your videos into assessments is easy with ScreenPal. 

1. Upload your video to your ScreenPal video hosting account. You can upload a video you created outside of ScreenPal, or upload directly from ScreenPal’s screen recorder or video editor.
2. Create a new quiz from your video. You can add questions and answers manually, or save time by starting with AI questions auto-generated from your video content.
3. Customize your quiz. For example, you can allow students to skip questions—or not. You can add automatic feedback to help learners understand their mistakes and allow retakes to improve comprehension. You can enable students to take quizzes anonymously for practice, or require a login so you can capture individual learner progress and feedback.
4. Share your quiz. Copy and share your QR code or link to share with students, or use the easy, responsive embed code to add to your class or assignment in your LMS. 

See how to create and share a video quiz with ScreenPal:

Explore all quizzing tutorials

Ready to jumpstart your school year with video quizzing?

Video quizzes are an easy and effective way to set your students—and yourself—up for success from the very first day. Whether you’re teaching K12 students or higher education courses, ScreenPal has everything you need to create engaging, interactive video experiences quickly and easily.

Get started now and see how ScreenPal can transform your back-to-school planning.

Create your first video quiz today!