Last updated on 14 September 2026
Last hour, Friday. You want to check in ten minutes what the class has retained from the chapter, without picking up thirty copies to correct in the evening. And there, it always gets stuck in the same place: the tool requires an account for each student, the school’s Wi-Fi gives up, or half of the class does not have a phone.
Live Quiz attacks precisely these three obstacles. It is a free web application for interactive quizzes in the classroom, hosted on the Forging educational digital commons, designed for teachers from primary to higher education.
Table of Contents
What is Live Quiz in practice?
Live Quiz projects questions to the board and gets the class answered live. Scores are displayed, a podium finishes the game, and you leave with a results file. On principle, we are close to what does Kahoot for years.
The difference lies in what is behind it. The application was written by two teachers, Vincent Schoeffter and Gauthier Remande, under a free GNU GPL license. It is housed on the Forge of the Ministry of National Education, as Maths Forge I was talking about a few months ago. No facilities, no accounts, neither for you nor for the students. Everything runs in the browser.
Two game modes, depending on whether your students have a phone or not
It is the structuring choice, and it does not depend on your questions but on what the class has in its hands.
The Classic Mode Looks like what you know: each student joins the room with a six-character code or a QR code, chooses a pseudonym, and responds from their device. Answering quickly earns more points.
The Paper Scan Mode is the one that interested me. Students receive a card printed in black and white, with a pattern and the letters A, B, C, D on all four sides. They turn the card so that their answer is at the top, they raise it, and you sweep the room with your phone. The vote appears instantly on the projected screen. The principle will remind something to those who have used Plickers, except that here the tool is free and there is nothing to create as an account.
| Classical | Paper scan | |
|---|---|---|
| Student material | One device per player | A paper card |
| Student Network | Essential | None |
| Limit | No practical limit | 50 cards |
| Score | Fairness and speed | Fairness alone |
For a low-equipped class, or for a coworker who doesn't want to handle thirty phones on, Scan Mode settles the matter. The cards print once and book all year round.
How to run a quiz with Live Quiz: instructions for use
The homepage is divided into three numbered blocks. It’s linear, we don’t get lost.
1. Fill in the question bank
Several entries, cumulative. You can enter your questions by hand, import a spreadsheet file (point-to-point separator, a blank template is downloadable), or upload one of the ready-to-use banks filterable by material and level. Convenient for a stand-up replacement.
On the AI side, Live Quiz relies on Albert, the sovereign AI of the state. You enter a theme, a number of questions, a level, and the MCQ arrives.
AI is not just about creating questions
This is one of the aspects that I find very interesting in Live Quiz.
The application does not just offer a ‘Generate with AI’ button. It allows you to start from educational content to produce a more contextualized quiz.
In particular, you can provide documents such as PDFs, DOCX files, a photo of a manual passed to the OCR to serve as a basis for generation. You can also paste a YouTube, PodEduc or PeerTube link: The transcription of the video becomes the source of the questions.
If you have just finished a chapter and want to quickly produce a revision MCQ, the interest is obvious: we start from our own content rather than from a completely generic theme.
You know the chorus: Irrespective of the AI, always read again. An AI is wrong about dates and numbers. Everything is corrected in the editing table, cell by cell.
2. Choose mode and adjust options
Mix the questions, remove the stopwatch, activate a Teams mode, switch to Poll mode without a good answer, anonymize the projected ranking. The latter option deserves a word: In a class where public failure blocks participation, displaying a nickname instead of the pseudonym changes a lot.
3. Open the session
Clicking on "Sign in" creates the room. In Classic mode, you project the QR code and room code. In Scan mode, a preparation screen opens the projector tab and connects your phone with a QR code. Beware of the trap reported by the authors themselves: only one camera at a time, otherwise the connection is lost in a loop.
4. Recover results
Export in spreadsheet (one row per student, one column per question, score out of 20, success percentage) or PDF ready to print. To be done before to close the session: once the page is closed, nothing is recoverable.
Recent developments: the phone becomes the remote control
The tool moves fast. The latest developments focus on ownership:
- Step-by-step guidance on the session screen, which accompanies you at every key moment.
- The telephone in the central position : it launches the quiz and serves as a complete remote control (close the question, reopen the votes, reveal the answer, project the ranking, add thirty seconds).
- Staff numbers can be changed at any time, including quiz launched. Two students arrive late, you go from 22 to 24 and the phone is notified immediately.
- Clarified wording : ‘Pupil overview’ and ‘Edit questions’ replace headings that were confused.
- A screen projected in clear theme by default, because a classroom projector washes away the dark backgrounds. Detail? Not at all, when the pupils in the background are unable to read the statement.
Free of charge, without account: and student data?
Free, no subscription, no premium version. On the data side, the bias is radical and this is what makes the tool interesting for an institution. Responses flow directly from device to device peer-to-peer, without a database. Your questions remain in your browser's local storage. No last name, no email address requested. When a direct connection is impossible, a frequent case behind a school firewall, exchanges pass encrypted through a relay hosted by the Incubator de l’Éducation Nationale in Paris.
A single function sends something outwards: generation by Albert. The topic or document submitted goes to a French government department. The instructions of the authors are clear and I relay them as they stand: Do not submit a document containing students’ personal data.
What I like, what I like less
I like:
- The total lack of account, for everyone. We win the first ten minutes of the session.
- Scan mode, which makes activity possible in a classroom without hardware.
- Generating questions from one’s own course or video.
- Careful attention to details of actual use: automatic reconnection of a student, proposals mixed differently on each screen, animations that respect the system setting ‘reduce animations’.
I like it less:
- Nothing works without the Internet on the teacher's side, even in Scan mode. The preparation goes offline.
- Fifty cards maximum in Scan mode, and cards printed before version 6.0 that are no longer recognized.
- The question bank lives in the browser. A data cleanup and everything disappears, except exporting a file.
- In Classic mode, speed enters the score. For an evaluation, this penalizes slow students without saying anything about their knowledge. I could not test the Scan mode with an entire class, but on paper it lends itself better since it only counts the correctness.
A tool born in a classroom
What is striking about the tutorial is the number of comments that can only come from practice: avoid backlighting, walk in the room rather than scanning from the office, rely on time because typing on a phone takes longer than you can imagine. You can feel the experience of teachers who have tested the tool. This is also an educational digital commons.
To test if you are looking for a sober alternative to commercial platforms, and to keep under the elbow if your classes are poorly equipped. Live Quiz can be accessed here, and its tutorial is read in fifteen minutes.
If you still hesitate between several solutions, I had gathered five online tools to create a quiz in a separate article.
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