Michael Fagan, ex-Microsoft guy and all around Nice Young Man, has revamped and re-released a tool he developed quite a while ago. Quizify, at http://quizify.com/, allows you to either enter a term list or link to a list of terms, then get a flashcard-type quiz that tests you on those terms.

The site has several examples of Web pages with term lists that turn into quizzes, but I wanted to make my own. After one failure I tried http://www.kodak.com/global/en/consumer/glossary/termsA.shtml, which is a list of photographic terms beginning with A, and asked Quizify to make a test out of it. Quizify found 17 questions, and displays them before you take your test. Clicking “run quiz” starts the test.

Quizify shows the definition and you have to type in the name of the thing being defined. If you get it right the quiz continues. If you get it wrong, you’re prompted to answer it again. You can also “give up,” see the answer, and the quiz continues.

Note the quiz does not just proceed in a straight line through the questions. It’ll ask questions in a random order, sometimes asking the same questions twice. I was taking another quiz and got one answer wrong, and Quizify seemed to go back to that same question several times.

The site worked really well with taking information from an external list and formatting it properly. The only time it didn’t work was when there was HTML in the definition. In the case of Kodak’s definitions, “Aspect Ratio” included a link to another Kodak definition list with an answer. Quizify broke that link. I don’t expect Quizify to fix links like this but maybe link HTML should be removed completely from the definitions?

This is a deceptively simple site but I could see where it would be very useful. If you’re a teacher and you already have a lesson plan page that includes a definition list, it would take just a moment and Quizify to turn that list into a flashcard-type study aid for your students.