Thursday, October 1, 2015

Listen Up Exam View Users!

For a few years now, Google has let you serve web pages from your Google Drive. Using Google Drive as a web server has been an excellent way to serve Exam View tests as  a web page to students. Google Drive served the web page, students completed the assessment, and Exam View scored and reported the results. Beautiful and elegant? Not particularly. Highly functional? You bet.

Google recently announced that it will be deprecating the ability to serve web pages from Google Drive, and that web page serving through drive will cease after August 31, 2016.  The demise of the Google Drive web server means big changes for Exam View users who post their tests online via Google Drive. Simply put, you won't be able to serve your exam view tests online as web pages with Google Drive after this academic year.

Some of the Exam View test banks and the Exam View programs in use in our District are nearing fifteen years in age. Fifteen years in computing time is several epochs! We've got 11 months to come up with an alternative way to host online Exam View tests. Personally, I'm not interested in creating yet another work around to drag into the future a program that should have long ago have been updated.

Let's resolve:

  • No more virtual boxes or other kludges to cobble Exam View success. 
Some alternatives to investigate:
  • Exam View Cloud (Now called TurningPoint Cloud) : Is it real and can it work?
  • Can Exam View test banks be adapted to 
    • Google Forms / Flubaroo?
    • Socrative?
    • Edmodo?
    • Serve the exams directly from your Macbook's web server?
    • Host the Exam View web pages on a paid service like Drop Box?
    • Something else?
Of course, if you use Exam View to *print* exams, deprecation of the Google Drive web server is not an issue for you. But, if you are serving Exam View pages for online tests, now is the time to budget for or otherwise agitate for Exam View's successor. Eleven months to go.

UPDATE 10/1/2015:
I was able to serve an Exam View web based test from wikispaces.com for free, and without advertisements!

Additionally, I was able to start the built in web server on my Macbook and serve Exam View tests to several student testers. This method was very easy to implement.

Whoop! Maybe 16+ years and new life for old Exam View?



4 comments:

  1. thanks a lot. I used dropbox for doing the same you did with google drive, but the html render service is ending up. i am gonna try wikispaces. thank you again

    ReplyDelete
  2. how you did to serve an exam in wikispaces.com. I found it almost impossible. I'm awaiting for your help

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think Wikispaces.com has a place where you can insert html. By viewing the exam view test as html, the html can be copied and pasted directly into the Wikispaces html box. It was a cumbersome process, which is why I don't use it.

      Delete
  3. Turning Technologies has created ExamView premium which has the online assessment capability built in. It's elegant and highly functional!

    ReplyDelete

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