How can today’s teachers incorporate more formative assessments into their teaching methods and achieve higher students gains? With several FREE resources and tools that I am reviewing. The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning.
Are there resources and tools available through technology to use in the classroom to assist in collecting the much needed feedback to increase learning through formative assessments? Yes, as a “low stakes” form of assessment, formative assessment should have low or no point value. With the evolution of technology, there are more resources and tools available now then at anytime before to assist teachers with incorporating formative assessments into their classrooms and throughout their teaching.
What is Formative Assessment? Formative assessment is the formal and informal assessments used by teachers to through out learning process to assist in modifying teaching and learning activities to improve student achievement.
I evaluated five different resources and tools to assist teachers in learning how to easily incorporate more formative assessments into their classrooms and teaching methods. Most importantly, these resources and tools will assist teachers in collecting the much needed feedback from their students to advance their learning within your classroom.
MY TOP FIVE RESOURCES AND TOOLS FOR FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT:
1. EDPuzzle— This website allows teachers to create easy and FREE videoclips to use within the learning environment. Teachers can take Youtube, TeacherTube and/or KHAN Academy videos and crop them, add voice over, voice notes and even input questions into the videos. The allows teachers to gain feedback about what students learned, prior knowledge and teach just specific information. This resource would be great to implement with students who are English Language Learners and those who have learning disabilities, as it gives them visual references, they could use assitive technology for translations have the information told to them. The program also collects all of the data based on each student’s use and responses to questions. I think this is a powerful tool that can assist students in learning and ultimately help teachers to use formative assessment to gain valuable feedback from each student.
2. BrainRush–Is an online portal where teachers can create FREE virtual classrooms, assign any BrainRush to any student and monitor the activity and progress of each student in real time. You can also easily differentiate your lesson plans by assigning remedial or advanced work based on unique student needs. Their library has a ton of BrainRushes, covering just about any topic. You can even create your own custom BrainRushes. They are currently building a Common Core Navigator that will help you find BrainRushes mapped to CCSS.Awesome! I played around with this tool and it would be great to use with students who have learning difficulties. The BrainRush that I tried was learning the Western States of the United States. It quizzed me on all of the states and then part II of the BrainRush had me spell each state independently. I accidentally misspelled one of the states and it keep randomly asking to spell that state again and again. Each time I clicked or typed a state name it read it aloud to me. This is a great tool for formative assessment.
3. Socrative— empowers you to engage and assess your students as learning happens– for FREE. Through the use of real-time questioning, result aggregation, and visualization, you have instant insight into levels of understanding so you can use class time to better collaborate and grow as a community of learners. This platform allows teacher to have access to instant feedback, personalized content, reports and compatibility of various devices. I like how this resource and tool allows you to have four types of formative assessments: Quiz, Quick Question, Space Race and Exit Ticket. I would use this formative assessment in the content area of social science. This is a valuable tool for teachers to assess student learning for all ranges of students–since this platform allows you to vary the level of understanding and collaborate within an RTI model or various other forms of collaboration.
4. iClicker–this is a great tool for immediate feedback about student learning. I have used this tool when I was doing my student teaching in the social science content area. I used it to test for prior knowledge, assess what the students’ current level of understanding was during a unit of study and as a pre-assessment before a formal assessment test. Since the time that I used this technology they have improved this system drastically. You can now use several different devices to have student respond to the questions. I only had access to the remote controls that were specifically designed for the software and there were many times students had some issues with the remotes working.
5. Plickers–can be used as a FREE quick checks for understanding to know whether your students are understanding big concepts and mastering key skills. This is a great tool to use with English Language Learners, students with disabilities and any students that might have a fear or resistance to responding to the whole class. When I was student teaching I used a lot of Thumbs Up/Down to check for understanding. With Plickers, this would cut down on teacher time to record where students were at and also provide immediate data on student responses. I love this idea and is a great tool for teachers to gather data and improve teaching strategies.
Those are my TOP FIVE RESOURCES AND TOOLS FOR FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT. Give them a try and please share your comments about your experiences with these awesome resources and tools to increase your teaching methods and the improvement of your students’ learning.
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