Week 12: Assessment Tools
EDCI 318 Technology for Teaching & Learning-SUMMER 18
Warning: video contains PROFANITY!
Good assessments should verify that:
American students face a ridiculous amount of testing. John Oliver explains how standardized tests impact school funding, the achievement gap, how often kids are expected to throw up.
It's not always about a grade. Sometimes watching students apply their learning, working in groups, or participating in classroom discussions is just as effective.
Thanks to technology, there are lots of fun and effective ways to assess learning in ways that transform your classroom. Here are some options for creating those assessments, or the new buzz work Exit Ticket.
Using Kahoot, EdPuzzle, Quizlet, GoFormative TedED, or Socrative (or a host of others) could be a good way to build introductory and review lessons for students. The option to track your students' progress is nice for anticipating the questions your students might bring to class and for seeing what you might need to review in-person with your students.
I (Bryan Mathers) read this guardian article recently where a woman asked Tinder for all her personal information. They sent her 800 pages worth of data. Apply this to the world of testing, which is increasingly data rich, and it doesn’t take much to make a pessimistic prediction. This thought was originally from a town hall discussion at the E-ATP conference, which I had the pleasure of participating.
All teachers want to bring their lessons to life
Even worse, if Jim had students watch docs at home, they wrote essays for accountability - more work for him!
With no time for more grading, and little room in a packed schedule, Jim turned to Edpuzzle for the solution.
Jim found the best documentaries for his class, and then assigned them through Edpuzzle. The results were surprising: his students were actually watching the videos, some as late as 3AM!
He could arrive in class the day a video was due, confident that his lesson would go well. He knew exactly who watched the video and who understood the content. With the Prevent Skipping and Fastforwarding features, there was no room for kids to get out of the homework on the sly.
Jim didn’t have to use an essay to force students into watching. And he didn’t have to rush to make time for in-class viewing. Edpuzzle freed up his time, both in and out of class, while engaging his students in his course curriculum.
20 Formative Assessment Tools for Your Classroom
The Shake Up Learning community is always chatting and sharing digital tools and lesson ideas for the K12 classroom. Recently, the discussed their favorite formative assessment tools for the classroom.
Here are 20 (in alphabetic order)
- Edpuzzle: Edpuzzle allows you to turn videos into a quick assessment. Choose a video on YouTube, Khan Academy, Crash Course, or upload your own. Trim the video, insert a quiz anywhere and track your students progress. (Freemium, basic account is free, additional features available with paid accounts.)
- Edulastic: Edulastic is a complete assessment dashboard. Teachers can create and track assessments, and even align with CCSS. They also offer a district wide-platform for sharing district-wide assessments. (Free for teachers, district-sharing requires a paid license.)
- Flipgrid: Flipgrid is a video discussion platform, that allows students to respond to questions, topics, and reflect using video. Students can also respond to each other, leave comments, and more. (Free!)
- Gimkit: Some have said that Gimkit is Kahoot on steroids. Gimkit is another fast-paced quiz game, but with an extra element. Student earn in-game cash to spend on game upgrades. Check out Leslie Fisher’s review and video to learn more.
- Google Classroom Question Tool: Inside Google Classroom, you have the option to create a questions and share that with students. You can make this collaborative, or just have the answers viewable for you the teacher. This is not a robust threaded discussion tool like I wish it was, but it can be handy for formative assessments and to check for understanding.
- Formative: Formative is a free online assessment tool that is very robust. Formative allows teachers to choose pre-made assessments and edit to fit your needs, create your own from scratch, or even upload a PDF or doc to create. They also offer some fantastic data that you can track and intervene when needed. (FREE and integrates with Google Classroom!)
- Google Forms: Google forms is a survey and quiz tool that is very easy to use. You can feed your form or quiz data into a Google Sheet for analysis and evaluation. Both Google Forms and Sheets also have many “add-ons” that give users even more capabilities that can power your formative assessments. (FREE)
- InsertLearning: InsertLearning is a Chrome extension that lets you turn any webpage into an interactive lesson. InsertLearning has this fantastic toolbar that will allow you to highlight text, add sticky notes, insert questions, videos, or even a discussion all inside the webpage! Learn more about InsertLearning here: 4 Ways to Blend Learning with InsertLearning. (InsertLearning is a freemium application, but you get your first five lessons for free.)
- Kahoot!: Kahoot! is a game-based learning and trivia platform that allows you to create very engaging quizzes for your classroom. Kahoot! is super fun and addictive. You can create your own kahoots, or choose from their library of games. Play live kahoots, in groups, issue challenges, or assign as homework. (FREE)
- Mentimeter: Mentimeter is an interactive presentation tool that allows you to poll your students, check for understanding, or ask students to vote. There are several different types of questions you can create, image-based, multiple choice, scales, open-ended, questions from the audience and more. You can even generate word clouds out of responses! (Freemium, some features are free.)
- Nearpod: Nearpod is an interactive classroom tool for teachers to engage students with interactive lessons. Nearpod allows you to create and share lessons that sync across devices and encourage student participation, and evaluate student responses through comprehensive reporting. (Freemium, some features are free.)
- Padlet: Padlet is a super easy to way to create an online bulletin board that allows teachers and students to share and collaborate. What’s great about Padlet is that it offers so much flexibility! It works on any device, and you can share just about any type of information–text, links, upload files, photos, videos, just about any kind of response. There are also many different ways you can design your pages. Customize the background, organize information in new ways. (Free trial available)
- Pear Deck: Pear Deck is a web-based formative assessment tool that allows you to create interactive lessons using G Suite tools. The Google Slides add-on has quickly become a favorite of mine. (I even teach it in my Google Slides Master Class!) Pear Deck offers a library of free templates that you can use to created interactive assessments in your slides. Pear Deck is also a freemium tool, some features are free, but you can get a 3-month Premium Membership with this special link for Shake Up Learning readers!
- Plickers: This assessment tool allows teachers to collect on-the-spot formative assessment data without the need to have students use devices or paper and pencil. Teachers create and print specially coded cards that students hold up in class as their response. The teacher uses the Plickers app to scan the cards and collect the data. (Free)
- Poll Everywhere: Poll Everywhere is a live audience polling tool that integrates into your presentation. You can ask questions during your lessons, see live data, and reports. (Freemium, free accounts are limited to 25 responses per poll.)
- Quizizz: Quizizz allows you to conduct student-paced formative assessments in a fun and engaging way for students of all ages. Quizizz works on just about any device and offers a library of public quizzes that teachers can use in their classrooms. They also provide detailed class and student reports. (FREE)
- Quizlet: Quizlet is a study tool that uses flashcards, games, and other “study sets.” to help students. Quizlet Live is a collaborative quiz game where students are placed into teams to work together to answer the questions and learn together. (FREE)
- Seesaw: Seesaw is a digital portfolio and communication tool that many teachers love! Seesaw works on any device shared or 1:1. Free for teachers. Teachers create activities for students. Students draw, take pictures and video, and capture their learning in their portfolio. Parents can view their students work and leave comments. (Freemium, some features are free.)
- Socrative: Socrative is a web-based formative assessment tool that allows teachers to create quizzes, ask questions, collect exit tickets and feedback. You can also create a competitive quiz bowl game, called, “Space Race,” where students compete to get the most answers correct. (Freemium with up to 50 students per session.)
- Spiral.ac: Spiral.ac is an interactive learning platform with a suite of collaborative applications. Deliver quick fire formative assessments, discussion, teams of students can work together to create presentations, and turn any public video into a live chat with questions and quizzes. (Freemium, some features are free.)
Thanks to Kasey Bell and Shak Up Learning for this resource list.
HINT: Wakelet Collection on Assessment Tools: Consider making an assessment collection
EdPuzzle: engage your students with Video Assessment with EdPuzzle
EdPuzzle: Add Your Voice and Text Questions to Educational Videos
You are using the FREE version of EDPuzzle as a TEACHER in your BROWSER on your COMPUTER
Create a Lesson Plan and an EdPuzzle Assessment
- Even though there are lots of great tools you could use from the list above, will be using EdPuzzle.
- Yes, you must use EDPUZZLE.
- Choose a lesson to create your assessment about (maybe you already have a lesson created you could use.
- Write up that lesson plan on the Lesson plan form or one of your choosing.
- Lesson Plan Template in PAGES format, or
- Lesson Plan Template in WORD format.
- (this is the same format you will use in your Student teaching portfolio).
- After you have completed the Lesson Plan, save it as PDF and add the PDF to Seesaw as a file (instructions below for how to add a PDF to Seesaw)
- By the way, this is the same lesson plan format as you will use when creating your student teaching portfolio. I encourage you to use the one provided.
- Find a video from Youtube or one of the other services built into EdPuzzle to use for your assessment.
- You must create your own questions, no you may not use one another teacher created.
- MAKE SURE your video SUPPORTS YOUR Lesson Plan.
- Create your assessment, one that could be used with your students to evaluate the learning from your lesson plan. IN OTHER WORDS, FOR A GRADE.
- Creating questions is a challenge for every teacher and takes lots of practice. This is your opportunity to create a valuable assessment that is not using bubble sheets!!
- You are using the FREE version of EDPuzzle as a TEACHER in your BROWSER on your computer.
- Make sure you create a TEACHER account.
- The app is only for your students.
- To create, you must use your browser on your COMPUTER.
- Share your interactive video assessment and Lesson Plan on in Seesaw.
- Make sure your video assessment is complete (an actual Test), a couple of questions is not sufficient.
- TEN (10) minimum or more if you need them. You must assume this is a real assessment you will be giving your students in your classroom that goes with the lesson you created and taught. So what do your students really need to know and be tested on?
- Add your EDPuzzle using the Public Link to the seesaw with the PDF of your lesson plan.
WARNING...WARNING....WARNING...
- Make sure you watch your video several times and create all your questions in advance of entering EdPuzzle to add them.
- After you have all your questions ready, go to Edpuzzle and add ALL questions in one sitting.
- We are using the FREE version, so starting today and finishing tomorrow, for example, doesn't work well, you just have to start over!!
- DO the editing (adding questions) in EDPUZZLE in one sitting!!!
- You are using the FREE version of EDPuzzle as a TEACHER in your BROWSER on your computer.
THERE WILL BE 2 POSTS, YOUR FILL ATTACHED LESSON PLAN AND YOUR EDPUZZLE URL LINK
Grading Checklist
- 25 Points: Lesson plan added to Seesaw as a PDF.
- 50 points: the shared with everyone EDPuzzle video assessment to seesaw (share with everyone means it can be viewed publically. (Instructions below)