Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Thing 18: Student Assessment & Feedback Tools



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   Padlet I have Padlet set up for teachers to share materials and supplies that they no longer need, so I can see the purpose, but I have not come up with a real-life application for my elementary school students. I read How to Use Padlet: A Fantastic Tool for Teaching.  I still can’t see myself using many of those ideas. 


o   TodaysMeet – After a quick visit to the Sample room for CoolTools folks I think that this is similar enough to Padlet and Answer Garden that I am not going to pursue it further.  I can see a lot of application for professional learning though.  It could be a parking lot for questions.  Of course, it could be used for that at any level, but at the elementary level in my school, I would be afraid that the students would focus on the technology (and get lost somewhere else) rather than pay attention to my lesson.

 
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

1 comment:

  1. WOW!!! You really dug in on this lesson. Thank you for all the tips and advice you shared. Love that you're going to do a session for your colleagues. I'll be coming back to your post when I get a chance to dig into assessment tools more thoroughly!

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