I set
out to explore this thing again this year because I want to offer a professional learning
opportunity to my staff about Student Assessment & Feedback Tools. We hope to eventually get approval for our
SMART Schools Bond Act application and actually get more (and more up-to-date) devices
into our school and into the hands of students.
Our teachers have been so long without devices that some need ideas for
how they will use them, while others are always searching for the new thing to
try with what we have.
Here is
a look at what I looked at:
Voting tools
o Dotstorming If you have a need to have a class vote, this is an
interesting way to do it. Not sure how I
would use it in my library, but it would be worth demonstrating for the
classroom teachers. One quick application that comes to mind is teachers who
have macaroni jars as behavior incentives.
When the jar is full, students vote on what they want the reward to
be. This would be a cool way to let the
students vote that would make the reward even sweeter.
Thought-sharing Tools
o AnswerGarden I can see how this might be good for brainstorming
purposes. They would be fun with a
professional development class. But I
don’t see how they are really applicable for much in my elementary school
learning environment. The best
application I could come up with to create a word cloud for PR purposes.
Video Assessments
o Vizia & EdPuzzle Good to know these products exist. I show so few videos that they are not
relevant to me. Similarly, I don’t think
most of my coworkers will need it, but if I was a middle or high school
teacher, especially a Social Studies teacher, I think that this would be
invaluable. It seems like a good thing
to use for a substitute plan. The
students could be actively engaged in learning regardless of what kind of
substitute ends up in the room. If you
coupled it with Google Classroom, the students wouldn’t even need the sub’s
instructions to start it.
Formative Assessment Tools
o Kahoot I used Kahoot with most of my 3-5 classes in the
spring. They loved it. I loved the instant
feedback as well as the availability of spreadsheets to track learning. BUT I don’t really have access to enough
portable devices to make this feasible right now. There is only one Chromebook cart for the
entire building. My library computers
are desktops that are not located near the SMARTboard, so the sad fact is that
the students can’t use Kahoot with our current computers because they can’t see
the questions from where they are.
o Quizziz This seems to make up for my problems with Kahoot. Although everyone has to take the quiz at
once, they can be on computers that are far apart. So, I could conceivably have up to 14 groups
being “quizzed” at once. I still can’t
do the entire class, but I could do half of the class and then the other half.
It is obviously easier to do the quiz on a touch screen device, but not
necessary. For the middle and high
school where so many students have their own devices, this would work very
well.
I like how you can add graphics. That means that this can be used for MANY
different subjects and types of assessment.
Too bad that the answer choices can’t be images as well.
I could see classroom teachers using this for
a quick formative assessment in math class.
When the students break into groups for differentiated learning, part of
their computer time (as most elementary teachers have 4-5 computers in their
room) could be completing a quiz to gather results for the next day. The teacher would lose some class time to
resetting the quiz for each small group, so they still might prefer Google
Forms.
o Spiral This is a British product. There were not many easily accessible videos
or examples to view. It is web-based or an app.
It does require devices for each student. In the Quickfire mode it appears that after
the initial sign-in with code process, the students could be at computers that
do not face a central screen.
o Formative I found the site itself strangely uninformative. They just wanted me to sign up before I
really understood what I was signing up for, but a YouTube video that I
located, https://youtu.be/0sA8pJY7cwM,
explained some of the benefits of the site. One of the best things seems to be
how flexible the site is. You don’t have
to retype everything. You can import
word documents, pdfs or google docs and put in spots (short answer, show your
work, true/false, or multiple choice) where the students answer on their
computer where they would have put their pencil and paper answer. Of course, you can build the questions from
scratch as well even adding graphics.
The students answer the assessment in one of three ways: you can enter a
class and invite them all, you can give them a link (through Google Classroom,
for example), or they can use a code on the goformative.com/join website. The advantage to the last one being that they
can log in as guest to be anonymous (at least from the site’s
perspective). From the promotional video
I found, https://youtu.be/1Cu8F6gMshg
, you can export your results. It is not
as flashy as Kahoot or Quizziz, but it would be much easier to convert your old
assessments to digital ones with this tool.
It is not clear to me at least if there is a way to stagger when your
students take the assessment or if you need 1:1 to take full advantage.
o Plickers This is not strictly an iOS product. It is available for Android as well. This is a great tool when you don’t have
one-on-one technology available. Quite a
few of our teachers are using this for instantly-available formative assessment
and up-to-the-minute DDI. I have not
used it myself. With 500 or so students,
there would be A LOT of cards to deal with.
Perhaps I could have one set and just reuse them with different classes
by assigning just numbers to the cards with each student having a number. I don’t know yet.
o o
Google
Forms I use this ALL the time – with my students
and with staff. I have students do
formative assessments on it. I collect
student evaluations of other’s presentations, student evaluations of group
member’s work, student reading interest inventories, and more. I have used this to help colleagues create
easy formative assessments for DDI tracking.
We use Google Forms to track faculty and staff opinions on library
materials, to gather contact information for the union, to collect
district-wide interest in professional learning and their evaluations of
district-provided professional learning.
Google Forms is awesome. Still
having enough technology available to fully implement it is an issue. If only the SMART Schools Bond Act money
would come in! I had tried the Flubaroo add –on for self grading quizzes time ago. It
seemed cumbersome in a way that Google Forms self-grading does not, but it does
allow for more answer formats that stand-along Google Forms does. In addition, some schools will have trouble
with the add-ons. (BTW, checking out the comparison reintroduced me to the
Control Alt Achieve blog which has some other interesting posts!)
o PearDeck –
This does look like a cool site. The free version only allows 30 participants
which would work for a classroom teacher, so I will show it during my
professional learning opportunity.
However, many of the features don’t work on the free version, including
Google Classroom integration.
Bummer. Without the 1:1 device, I’m
not sure it is something I would personally use.
Portfolio +/or Blogging Tools
o SeeSaw For the most part, we don’t have iOS devices, so this
option is out. Actually, after a little
exploration, I found out that they do support Android devices, Chromebooks, and
computers with Chrome or Firefox.
However, from what I saw, this is more of a blogging or a portfolio tool
than an assessment tool. As a result, it
is not really what I am looking for.
This is all complicated by the fact that MANY of our students cannot be
photographed or have their names posted on the web, so showing parents work via
a web app is not a good idea for my school.
o
Flipgrid I can’t see when I will have the time/need for video
responses to questions at this point and the fact that it is a pay site makes
it less attractive. I suppose that this
might help to garner student interest, but if you need a gimmick to get the
students interested in the library, then maybe you need to rethink your
program. I accessed the link to 2nd
Graders Use Their Research To Respond Via Flipgrid! But I couldn’t actually see the student work. After some Googling, I did find a fresh link
to a project on text structure at https://expectmiraculous.com/2016/09/22/students-as-teachers-exploring-text-structure-with-flipgrid/
The students are having fun, BUT this takes an enormous amount of time to video
all of the responses, not to mention the need for so many devices. Fun for an end-of-the-year-when-you-have-extra-time
activity, but again the fact that so MANY of our students cannot be
photographed makes this impractical.
Well, I have found several
good tools to use and to introduce to others.
I spent many hours doing it, so I don’t think I will use the More to
Explore right now, but I will check out those links in the future.
Okay, I lied. I couldn't help myself. The link to Take Three! 55 Digital Tools and Apps for Formative Assessment Success has several other worthwhile links to check out!
Take Three! 55 Digital Tools and Apps for Formative Assessment Success
Okay, I lied. I couldn't help myself. The link to Take Three! 55 Digital Tools and Apps for Formative Assessment Success has several other worthwhile links to check out!
Take Three! 55 Digital Tools and Apps for Formative Assessment Success