Formative assessment tools

So I've been playing with ways to assess students understanding and ensure they are secure in their knowledge.

I've been playing with a few tools and I'll go in order of my favourites.

Plickers - www.plickers.com

Plickers is a great tool to use if you don't have a great student internet or device availability. 

Students have a piece of card and hold up the card in different ways to show their answer. They each have an individual card so you can see what each student has answered. To collect answers you scan the room with the camera of a device (either ios or android). It will collect the answers, from the students.

Pros	Cons
Easy to use and easy for students to understand.	You can only ask multiple choice questions.
You can download class information into CSV, excel files to review.	You may need to unblock/remove from a blacklist their cloud image sharing site.
Easy to see display on the app means you can identify who is getting the right or wrong answers.	You have to download the app onto your mobile device or tablet, trying to do it from a laptop is really hard.
Students can easily see if they have voted using the live view on a screen or with a projector.	Difficult to use if windows or light sources are behind students.
Students can easily see how they are doing and how others are doing in class, but still remain anonymous with how people have voted.
Student's don't need a device.

Kahoot

Kahoot is a great way to assess knowledge or get feedback from students and doesn't require an app on students devices to access. It can be used on every type of device mobile and laptops. You can ask multiple choice questions and students love it and its timed and gives points for speed and accuracy.

Pros	Cons
Easy to use and easy for students to understand.	You can only ask multiple choice questions.
You can download information regarding how your students have answered.	Every student or group needs a device.
It has a group mode so if you don't have 1:1 devices you can allow discussion time.	The music is really annoying, which doesn't sound bad until you have listened to it 10 times in a day.
There are loads of quizzes by other teachers that you can use and adapt to your classes.	If your internet connection is patchy in any way the screen will freeze and students will get very upset.
Students love it.

Kahoot questions with answers

Mentimeter

Great app to review feedback and to check understanding. Again it asks multiple choice questions but the main point of this is as a decision-making tool. It shows a bar graph on the screen and is great for getting students to collaborate and make decisions. You can also use it to ask a question and students can respond.

Pros	Cons
Looks simple and very easy to view answers	You can only ask multiple choice questions.
Students go to a website menti.com and input a code to access the site.	Unless you allow multiple votes it will not allow more than one vote per device. Which is difficult if you don't have 1:1 devices.
Unless you allow multiple votes it will not allow more than one vote per device. Which is great for making sure you only get one vote per person.

Socrative

Still playing with this one so can't yet do a pro's and cons list but I'm definitely finding it interesting. It's a way to get answers from students. It's the only programme that allows long answer questions. Students can also vote on their favourite answer to questions and this allows students to learn from each other.  

Socrative home page

BETT

BETT

So I went to the BETT conference on Saturday. Wow, that is one big event and it was so busy.

Seminars

So I was a bit slack and only went to half of one seminar but there was so much to see! I saw a brilliant discussion from Lauren Thorpe (Head of data and Systems strategy, ARK), Catherine Scutt (Director of Education and research, Chartered College of teaching) and Nic Newman (Partner, Emerge education) all compered by Abdul Chohan (Director of Learning and development, The Olive Tree Free School). So all very experienced individuals, discussing teacher workload. The first Question which really interested me was "How can technology reduce workload?" The answers and discussion were quite enlightening.

- Technology in schools should be easy to use and reliable. This is something I'm definitely struggling with at the moment with Microsoft technology it isn't easy to use and it isn't reliable across different platforms. Google sometimes have these issues as well but they seem to be less frequent nowadays.

- Schools need to evaluate the technology they are using to see if it has benefits or whether it is just extra work.
I have been part of an evaluation process in a previous school and I have to say that when we found that the idea had not worked out as successfully as hoped it did not go down well.
I will now be putting in place an evaluation tool to work out if the effort I'm putting in is effective and not losing sleep if it isn't. I think I'll start off with the student's voice as this is often the easiest way to collect feedback. I will try more quantitative analysis with a couple of apps I'll be using later on in the year as well.

- Coursera is a great place to get CPD, yeah it really is.

Technology and apps

Science Journal - Google were showcasing this one and gave me more ideas on how to use it. The Chromebooks have more functionality in some ways than Ipads to use this as they contain a magnetometer but actually, they are still pretty good. Can't wait to use this in more ways.
- Available on Google Play and IOS free
Science journal website on google

Book Creator - This is an app where you can make your own book add video, sound, pictures and text. It can be downloaded as an epub or a pdf. The free version allows students to make one book at a time. It doesn't have spellchecker or grammar checker but it does make pretty books that can possibly help organise students work in a clearer fashion. To be fair if you are working on the computer and have Grammarly on your chrome app you can use that to check out the spelling and grammar.

Squid Notes - So I've had a quick play with this and the free app is a way to draw notes but not type them. You can type them and draw on PDF's, however, this is only available in the paid part of the app. Could be useful especially if you get a lot of PDF's and want to write on them digitally and then share them it's only £4.79 for the PDF import tool. 

Squid notes webpage - https://www.squidnotes.com

Microsoft specific apps and tools

Paint 3D - Available on any computer installed with Windows 10.

I met some of the developers of this app and they were super excited and really knowledgeable and weirdly enough for people developing tools had actually spoken to teachers (one of the members of their team is a graphics teacher) and they had got some of his students in to test it. I've had a play with it and I can see that for graphics student's it might be great but I can see it being a massive waste of time for student's in science for example. 

Using Padlet in the classroom

Using Padlet

Padlet is a really useful collaborative programme and I've got to say I really love it for use in class. It's a great way for students to learn from each other.

The limitations are: 

- You have got to monitor students posts as they tend to get excited about the fact that they have free reign to post whatever they want. This calms down after the first few uses as they like the positive feedback.
- Trying to get students to all log onto a new programme at the same time is little like herding cats.

The Positives are:

- Students can post video's, photo's (I especially like photo's of their work), links to useful websites and any document they have on their device.
- Feedback is really easy for teacher and students to give to each other (I especially love the fact you can choose to like posts).
- It's a way to promote rewindable learning from the students.
- You can make it look really pretty really easily. Which is important to students and means they tend to engage a bit better.

How to use this in the classroom

First of all make your link easy to write down, especially if your a school using Microsoft 365, and sending out a group email is quite challenging. This will make your life so much easier and especially for students who are struggling with spelling and literacy.
Students really enjoy working as collaborators, and sharing their knowledge. Students need a place to practice commenting on others work and Padlet is a great place it allows you as a teacher to delete innapropriate comments (really easily if you download the app onto a tablet), it allows teachers to comment on posts and give a thumbs up to great comments or posts. 

I quite like padlet as an easy way for students to share their knowledge. It's easy to use and students can use it on a range of devices (it even works on ipads). For a revision tool it works quite well. I've only tried it as a way to reflect on their learning so far. I would like to use it for individual students to post every lesson and then use it as an aid to revision. If you try it let me know how it goes. It will be easier to monitor in a Google apps for education school as students and teacher can log in using their google account.

http://www.lunarbaboon.com/comics/feedback.html