A slide deck is an odd thing to build a quiz from. Five words and a photo of a volcano is a complete slide when you are standing next to it and explaining. As a document it is nearly empty. Any tool that reads only the slide text will quiz students on your headings, which is not the same as quizzing them on what you taught.
What ClassSense reads in a deck
Upload the .pptx as it is. Slide by slide, ClassSense picks up:
- the slide title and the text in every text box, including text inside grouped shapes
- tables, read row by row
- speaker notes, which are kept with the slide they belong to
It does not read what is locked inside a picture. A screenshot of a paragraph, a chart saved as an image, a labelled diagram, an equation pasted as a picture: all of that is invisible, and the questions are built from the words around it.
The cheapest fix is your notes
If a deck is thin, do not rewrite it. Open the notes pane on the dozen slides that carry the real teaching and type what you say out loud. On a slide titled "Prophase" the notes might say that chromosomes condense and become visible, the nuclear envelope breaks down, spindle fibres form, and that kids mix up chromosome and chromatid every single year. That last sentence is the valuable one, because named misconceptions are what the wrong answer options get built from. Ten minutes of notes does more than any setting.
Two things "quiz" can mean here
Practice inside the app. Each skill pack made from your deck carries about a dozen multiple choice questions, running from easy to hard, with hints and feedback. Wrong options are tied to a named misconception, so a wrong answer tells you what the student believes, not just that they missed it. Students answer, and mastery is tracked per skill.
A document you print or edit. In the course, open Create Content, choose Assessment and pick a published skill pack. You download a Word file with a mix of multiple choice, short answer, true/false, fill-in-the-blank and matching questions, and a grading scale. It is written from that skill's topic and learning objective, so read it against your deck before you hand it out. Short answers are graded by you.
The walkthrough
Add notes where they matter
Thin slides plus a few lines of notes beats a perfect-looking deck with nothing behind it.
Upload the PPTX
In the course, open Materials and choose the file. Expect about three minutes.
Read the skill packs
Check the names of the skills and a couple of questions. Publish, reorder or remove.
Pull an assessment if you want paper
Create Content, Assessment, then a skill pack. Edit the .docx freely.
Long decks. One upload becomes up to 10 skill packs, so a seventy-slide lecture series is better split into two or three files, one per part of the unit. Each file then gets its own set of skills instead of being squeezed into one.
Where it does not fit
The questions follow the skills in your deck, not the slide order. If you want exactly one question per slide, in sequence, for a live check during the lecture, this will not produce that. Decks that are mostly images, such as an art history slideshow or a photo-driven geography deck, will come back thin. And an assessment is only as trustworthy as your read of it. The review guide is the five-minute habit that keeps a wrong answer key from reaching students.
Common questions
Are my speaker notes used?
Yes. Notes are read along with the slide text and kept attached to their slide, so they count as source material.
Do students need anything beyond the class code?
They create a student account and enter your six-character class code. There is no Google sign-in, and nothing to install.
I teach with Keynote. Will that work?
ClassSense takes PDF, DOCX and PPTX. Export the Keynote file as a PowerPoint (.pptx) and upload that, then glance at it to confirm the text survived.
Can I get a quiz with one question per slide?
No. Questions are organised around skills, so a slide that carries no skill produces nothing, and a skill that spans six slides is covered once.