Gnowledge: A Closer Look

Last month I had the opportunity to do a basic review of the website Gnowledge. After some collaboration and spending more time on the site, I've decided to do a more in depth review of this wonderful new teaching tool.

Gnowledge is a free site designed for creating and sharing tests. This is done in through an innovative user interface that is very easy to use. Anyone familiar w/ test creation sites or PowerGrade will feel right at home. Also, there is a definite social networking aspect that is ideal for 21st Century learning through collaboration and the sharing of tests and answers.

Another great feature of Gnowledge is how user friendly the website w/ excellent hands on tutorials and a great FAQ page. I highly recommend viewing these brief videos to get a solid understanding of what this excellent site has to offer. For example, a user has many options for editing their tests w/ features such as: privacy controls, adding images, adding text snippets, etc etc. Once these tests are created then can be shared w/ others and used to enhance learning.

However, w/ all that being said what really makes Gnowledge shine are the test activity reports. Teachers and students alike can easily view their results and see which questions they got wrong while viewing their response and the right answer. This is a very useful feature especially when doing self reflection or for self based learning.

After reading this it may sound like any other test/quiz creation site which I've blogged about before, but that's really not true. At heart this is a social network/community that is designed to enhance learning and collaboration through the creation of tests. This can be a very useful tool for educators and students to gauge their success on a given topic or subject or even practice for an upcoming exam.

Below is a great example of how this site is being used in another country...

"The best example of how Gnowledge is being used and how it transcends language and cultural barriers and education syllabuses is by a French language teacher in Mexico (a Spanish-speaking country). She uses Gnowledge (an English-language website) to produce simple tests and exercises for her students. In three months she has published 43 tests and these tests have been administered to her (and other) students 1,139 times. Scale of this magnitude does not happen in conventional classrooms or schools. (Gnowledge)"

Also, since Gnowledge is in beta there are still lots of features to come, such as timed tests and history tracking. It would be nice to see if some mobility options open up too.

New sites are popping up all the time w/ cloud computing and mobile devices leading the way. Although, not all of them have this nice polished look (especially in beta) and really get what education is all about, the way that Gnowledge does.

I highly recommend checking out Gnowledge by clicking here and see how it can work for you!!