Assessments are an area where you could devote a lot of time trying to find the perfect assessment that would enable all students to have an equal opportunity to show what they know and can do with the material. There are many forms available both in the traditional paper format, or perhaps project format, and now with all of the web tools available, there are many more options for assessing students. In prior posts, I mentioned a few of these assessment tools just to give you an idea of what some of the options are that are available to teachers for use in the classroom. I could tell you the ones that I use most frequently but that does not mean these same tools would be the best choice for you and your students. So it depends on what type of assessment you are looking for, formative or summative, and what do you want the students to show by completing it, that’s where I would begin.

Some fun ways to start

Do you want a way to get a quick idea of whether or not the students understand the basic concept or a group of vocabulary words for example? Then you could use something quick such as Kahoot or Quizizz. Or an even quicker way to ask one question possibly to start your class, is to use a tool like PollEverywhere and ask students one question at a time and then look at their answers.  Maybe you are looking for a different way to have students discuss something and need more options available for students to enter longer answers or even include images or other links as part of their answer. Those options are available now as well. But first, for the time being, let me tell you about two tools that I find to be quite useful on a regular basis in my classroom for quick assessments.

Kahoot and Quizizz

Since I have already discussed Kahoot! in my prior blog post, I will only state again that it is a great option for engaging the students, assessing their learning, having data quickly available and having some fun with the students in the process. A newer option that I have been using is one called Quizizz. Quizizz functions in a way similar to Kahoot and other tools like it in that students can access it by entering a join code, teachers can create their own quiz or search for some that are available on the public database. You can add images, provide a variety of choices, mark which answer is correct, but the only difference is that once you launch this assessment, the questions and answers appear on each student’s device.

You can set a timer so that the students have to answer each question within a certain time, but once they answer, they immediately get feedback and are surprised by the appearance of an image, a “meme” if you will, that pops up in between each question, which basically tells them they are either correct or incorrect. It is highly entertaining and the fun part about it in addition to these features is that when watching on the Smartboard you can see in real time how each question is being answered, tallied with correct or incorrect or not answered yet.  The display almost resembles a race and you can see each student’s progress across the screen.  At the end you can access the questions at the bottom, save the data and see how each student answered, look for trends, and so much more. Like some of the other assessment tools, you can have all of the results instantly and download a spreadsheet or a chart to get the feedback. The chart is even color coded to make it easier for you to see the areas that are in need of some additional instruction or use it for any other type of data analysis that you prefer. There are a lot of options available for you to analyze the results, so I recommend you just explore it on your own and find what benefits you and your classroom.

How do the students like Quizizz?

I always like to find out from my students how they feel about some of these tools, I find their input to be very important since in the end they are the ones that are using it.  I want them to be engaged in the activity, enjoy the learning, as well as have some fun in the process. I was excited to try Quizizz for the first time and my students were very excited while playing it, their surprise and reaction to the images that popped up and seeing their progress really did make for a meaningful, engaging experience.  By the way, the options enable you to mix the questions, remove the memes in between questions, and many more choices.

How about some discussion or online collaboration?

Another tool that you may consider if you have not already used it or heard of it is Today’s Meet. Today’s Meet is a backchannel discussion tool and is a great way that you can quickly create a question for discussion in your classroom or as I have used it in the past, set it up similar to online office hours where you are available for students to ask questions live, and it keeps track of the questions and you have a transcript available for others who may have similar questions. But it is a great way to discuss any variety of topics in class, perhaps during a video or another activity.  It also gives students an alternate method of responding which does not require paper but they can simply connect to the room through their phone or device and enter their name and their response. People can comment back and forth to each other and it really is a quick way to open up discussion in the classroom can be used at the start of class before even beginning the lesson to determine opinions or ideas that students may already have about a certain topic.

How does it work?

To begin, once you have created an account if you want, creating a room for your meeting is very simple.  All you need to do is go to the website, create a name for your room and share the link with whoever you need to access the room. You can choose to have it open for a specific period of time, you can even create an account and claim that room and use it as an ongoing basis. Whatever your needs are, quick answers or more extended discussion topics, Today’s Meet would be a very easy tool to begin using in your classroom. It does not require any of the users to have any login information other than the link and the transcript of all conversations can be saved and referred to later if needed.

So as I said there are many more choices available for assessing or having your students be more involved in a discussion, but if you want to start off quickly, these would be two really good ways that you can start. In my next discussion, I will add on a few other ways that you can use for classroom discussion, backchannel chatting and alternate assessments for your students. Thank you for reading, please contact me with any comments or questions I look forward to hearing from you. Twitter: @rdene915

Integrating Technology:  Fast ways to assess your students

Are you looking for a faster, more engaging way to assess your students? Do you like to use entrance or exit slips, or find out how students are doing or what they are thinking?  If your answer is yes, then try some of these assessment tools.

Why use technology for assessing?

Not all students are willing to express themselves in front of their classmates, and we’ve all been there when the question posed to the class, “Does anybody have any questions?” is then followed by silence. No questions?  Really?  While sometimes there really aren’t any questions, other times, or even quite possibly, a lot of the time, there are questions but students are afraid or uncomfortable asking them in the classroom. There is a fear or unease of showing vulnerability perhaps by asking a question.  So for any of these reasons, using one of the many assessment tools in class can be quite helpful for both teachers and students and for different reasons.  I find these can help to engage students more and enable us as teachers to really develop a better understanding of where the students are in terms of their learning and growth in the classroom.

A few tools to start with

I use a variety of assessment tools for different reasons in my classroom, but I would like to tell you about the first few that I found to be very useful. I started using Survey Monkey a few years back as a way to find out generally how the students were preparing, what kind of activities helped them the most and the least, what areas they thought they needed some additional help with, and I also added any extra question for them to add  additional comments or concerns.

Because I wanted them to all complete the survey, I gave them credit and to do this, I asked them to provide their Celly user name for identification.  I strategically placed the “identify yourself” question at the very end of the survey and I provided reassurance that their personal answers would not be shared and it was just information to help guide me in deciding how to best provide instruction for them in my class. It worked out great with all of its features, analyzing the data through summaries and also looking at their individual answers, really did provide a wealth of information to help me make my instruction better for them. It also gave me the opportunity to see what they needed in terms of personalization and I value this information the most.

As time passed, I found more uses for Survey Monkey such as short quizzes, entrance or exit slips and other formats for engaging them in the class discussion. And it was great because the answers were quickly available, no student login or sign up was needed and I could save the information to refer back to at any time. Now if you are like me, you like to try a variety of things and maybe you have a top 3 or top 5 list of your favorite tools for an area of your instruction.  I do as well and would like to share a few others with you.

Have you heard the phrase? “On my Soap Box”

The name of this tool immediately caught my attention because of its name, many times hearing the reference to “getting on one’s soap box” to discuss something.  So the next tool I tried, is in fact called, GoSoapBox.  GoSoapBox is another quick way to assess students and does not require students to create an account but rather have an event code to enter.  The event code is assigned to your specific created class or “event.” The expression “soapbox” does go back a long way but GoSoapBox is a great way for students to communicate and respond to polls, quizzes and discussion questions. And the nice thing is that students can respond openly, and their responses are saved and readily available. This is a great way to pose a question to a class and have students share their answers, and then they can be displayed on a SmartBoard for open discussion. As a teacher, I can always refer back to their answers and use this as a way to work with students individually and help them to enhance their skills.   My students liked using this format because it involves technology and it is quick and easily completed on their phones or other device.  And more importantly, it was something different than they had done in their other classes and other assessments they had done.

Kahoot! A “game” changer for sure

My next favorite came a little bit later in the spring of 2014 and that was Kahoot!. I could spend a long time talking about the numerous ways I have found to use Kahoot! in my foreign language classroom and the energy and enthusiasm that the mere mention of the word creates for my students is unreal.  However, just to give you a few highlights if you have not yet used it, Kahoot! is a great way to have students engage in a game, with questions ranging from vocabulary identification, to images or video, fill-in-the-blank and any type of question that you want with various answer choices. Students can play on any device, the question appears on your screen or Smartboard and students enter a game pin to join your game.

So how does it work? The game Kahoot! Is kind of set up like the trivia games you may have played at restaurants. After each question, students know where they rank, and at the end of the game there is a winner and the top 5 players are listed. And what’s even better is that you can have the feedback and results instantly.  You have the option to open the results directly or email a spreadsheet to yourself. So while it can be used for fun and is great for engaging students in the learning process, it is also a way to quickly assess students and provide feedback quickly as well. Even better, they can now play against themselves in the “ghost mode.”  And if time is an issue for you, there are many public Kahoots available that people share and you can borrow them and use them for your class.  Another way I have used Kahoot to enhance student learning is to have them create games for us to use in class. This way they are getting the practice that they need and the class as a whole has more opportunities for fun, engaging ways to learn. All you have to do make sure their questions have correct answers marked and advise students to set the timers for each question accordingly.

So for now, these are three different and quick ways you could try for implementing alternate assessments in your classroom.  Try one of them or all of them, they are easy to use and I think you will find students will be interested and more excited to learn.  By just having something different than a paper and pencil assessment and the ability to use their device to complete it, can lead to positive changes in how your students learn.

Until the next time, keep working on that technology integration and send me your thoughts. I would love to hear how it has been going so far. And if you want to see some examples, feel free to contact me at rdene915@gmail.com or @rdene915. Next time I will talk a bit more about some of these and other assessment tools. Thanks for reading!

We all know that we must assess our students regularly using formative and summative assessments.  Assessments are needed in order to determine what learning has occurred, what areas need to be reinforced, and as teachers, what our next steps must be.  We need this information to guide our instruction and help decide what additional opportunities to provide for our students.  We also must assess our students so that we can have the vital information necessary to provide feedback to them, in order to guide their learning. Providing them with timely, relevant feedback is essential to helping their growth and reflection on their learning and needs.  Assessments are an integral part of the learning process for teachers and students for these reasons.  So how can we make assessments more effective, informative and engaging too?

Why use technology for assessments? 

Depending on the number of classes we have, and the number of students in each class, creating numerous assessments in a variety of forms, grading them and providing feedback in a timely manner, can become quite time consuming. However, with the numerous tools available for technology integration, assessing students in a variety of different ways is now available. Teachers can now conduct quick entrance and exit slips, administer surveys, engage students in discussions both in and outside of class, create quizzes and other more formal assessments to determine what learning has occurred. And what’s even better than all of these possibilities mentioned, is how quickly the results can be obtained, evaluated and feedback provided to the students.

Some of the tools available provide instant feedback to teachers in several forms.  Teachers can select to receive downloadable spreadsheets, a quick email with the results and some offer other formats as well, all of which help to develop an understanding of where the students are in terms of their learning and what areas need a bit more focus and instruction.
What differences can you expect?

In my classroom, I need to assess my students on a regular basis because learning a foreign language, especially at the lower levels, requires ongoing evaluation of how the students are understanding the material.  Since I am teaching a language, feedback on a regular basis is critical so students can build their vocabulary and enhance the four language skills.  With the number of students I have in the lower level, providing assessments and giving feedback to the students in a timely manner has always been a priority to me. I wanted to grade quizzes and return them the next day, because that is when I believed it was most needed and effective.  The results of student assessments are necessary so that we can continue our learning plan. However, sometimes due to other time constraints, or the length of assessments, grading their work and returning it the next day, in spite of my best efforts, did not always happen, and for this I needed  to find a solution.

With the tools available through technology, many of these concerns have disappeared and made a tremendous difference in the efficiency of my classroom and my teaching procedures, and the types of assessments I can create for my students and meet their diverse learning styles.

Where to begin: What are some tools to start with?
Using tools such as Edmodo, Kahoot!, Responster, Socrative, Survey Monkey, Quizizz, Riddle and several others like these, I can quickly create discussion questions, quizzes, a survey, or combination of all of these and provide the link to my students to complete in class. There are so many options for creating a formative assessment using any of these tools and many more are available.  Once they’re all finished, I can see the results or even download the results directly to my computer, download the information to a spreadsheet or I can analyze the statistics in a variety of ways. Assessing students using tools such as these, makes the use of entrance slips and exit slips much easier and quicker.  By having your students complete an entrance slip using one of these tools at the beginning of a period, it enables you to have the results within only a few minutes and use this valuable feedback to help guide your instruction for the day or make changes as needed.  You can also use these results to provide valuable information back to the students, one on one, and help them to work on their personal growth and reflection.

The results of the assessments are stored and they can be shared with students in a variety of ways if desired, as well.  Teachers can refer back to the results to track growth, to note patterns in certain classes or students, and to provide individual feedback to students on their strengths and weaknesses. I find it beneficial to my professional growth as well and use these results to reflect on my instruction in class. With technology, assessments are fast and can be saved for later reference.  Paper assessments get lost but assessments created using one of these tools are stored and can be referred to as often as needed.

Benefits of using these tools
There are so many options for conducting assessments in the classroom and in addition to allowing teachers to conduct this type of evaluative work in a quicker manner, it lessens the paperwork involved.  It also benefits students because they learn additional vital technology skills as well.
All of these tools can be used in any grade level or subject area and they do not require students to create an account but can be shared simply through a shareable URL which can be posted on a class website or sent on messaging tool such as Celly, which is used in my classroom, or any other messaging app.  The ability to design, share and evaluate assessments using these and other tools is remarkable.
So if you’re looking for a better way to provide feedback to your students, to streamline some of the assessments that you do in class, and definitely to reduce the amount of paper used, I suggest trying one of these tools that I mentioned. There are many options available but these are just a few of those that I have used at least at the start of my integration of technology into my classroom and ones that have had a huge impact on the assessments conducted in my classroom. My students have truly enjoyed having these alternate ways to show what they know and can do with the material.   Thank you for reading.  I look forward to sharing more ideas with you about tools for student collaboration and sharing of ideas.  Next topic will focus on specific assessment tools and how to use them in your classroom.

So if you have been gradually working toward integrating more technology into your classroom, in a way similar to how I started, I hope that you are seeing some results at this point. Maybe you started with a Messaging App.  If so, do you see improvement in the way you can communicate with your students and they can collaborate with one another? Or did you start using an LMS?  Have some of the frustrations which came about because of lost papers, forgotten assignments, or students who missed learning opportunities due to class absences, started to disappear? I hope so. Because if they have, then that means that the steps you are now taking are having a positive effect on your classroom and are enabling you and your students to experience a more efficient and beneficial learning environment.

It takes time, there is no doubt, but we must persist when we take on any new venture. Sometimes it can take longer than we like, because we run into difficulties and roadblocks.  You have to expect new questions to appear while seeking the solution to the prior questions. That’s the nature of the game. But this ongoing cycle also promotes goal setting and makes us more driven as educators.
The next step

In my last post, I was talking about the uses of Blendspace as a means to curate resources and flip your classroom. It does not matter what you ultimately decide to use, but having one place to keep your resources is a really great idea. We can all become overwhelmed by the many new technology tools that are brought to our attention every day. There are so many out there and choosing one can be quite difficult. So how do you make that decision? Looking at sites such as Graphite or EdShelf can help.  Seeing the feedback of other educators that have used some of these technologies in their classroom is definitely a good way to learn more about a tool, its functionality and applicability in your classroom. For example, using something like EdShelf, you can get a summary of the uses of a web tool, see what age group it is recommended for, which areas of instruction it would apply to, and read some stories about user experiences. If you have not checked EdShelf out yet, I recommend taking a look.

Back to Blendspace: Many possibilities

So going back to Blendspace, I like to talk about it because it really does provide a variety of benefits to me both personally and professionally.  It enables me to flip the classroom and to save that vital classroom time when we’re all together, for student interactions, engaging activities, or even for students to work independently while I facilitate their activities, rather than talk the whole class period. I can create a lesson and share it with them through their account on Blendspace or through the URL link and post it on Edmodo. Regardless of how the lesson is shared, they have access to many resources and can learn asynchronously outside of the classroom, on their own schedule, using whatever device they choose.

Learning can take place anywhere at any time. Students can work on a lesson in the car on the way to a game or late at night when they decide to stay up and work on something. It does not matter because the choice is theirs and that’s the great thing about technology and the usefulness of tools like Blendspace which enable flipping the classroom and storing so many resources in one place. I have also used it as a great way to store some of the various assessment tools, presentation software, or examples of projects that I have created. It makes it easier to share ideas with colleagues and at conferences and it’s a great way for me to be able to review the work I have done, to make suggestions to others, and to also see my own growth and reflect on my progress on the learning continuum.

When students create projects for my class, they don’t have to worry about fumbling with a flash drive and I don’t have to worry about losing valuable class time opening emails and attachments.  There is no concern for privacy with any grades or other information being shown. I can compile all of their projects into one lesson, give it a title, and open up one lesson which contains all of their work and display them one after another for the class to enjoy. If the students want to see each other’s work they can access it, it is stored permanently and so we can always go back and obtain the link and see what tools they have already used in class.
Building a Lesson with Blendspace

Building a lesson for any level or discipline is quite easy as well. You can take any topic and using the tools provided such as Google Search, Educreations, Google Drive, Dropbox, selecting a file to upload from your computer, and several others to search for relevant information. All it takes is finding the resource and dragging it into place in your lesson. You can add boxes, move items around, but no matter what you do it is done quickly and enables you to provide a lot of additional learning opportunities and resources for the students. And it can also be used by the students to create a project for your class, if they want to include text or a quiz or a variety of media resources, they have many options.

So these are just some of the reasons why I am really happy that I found Blendspace and how its use has benefitted my classroom. My initial reasons for using it have evolved over the past 3 years and I continue to find new ways to integrate it into my classroom. I hope that you will check it out and create a lesson and see if it works for you. It might be another area which can provide great benefits in your classroom, or it might just lead you to explore other tools. Either way you will be integrating additional technology into your classroom and you and your students will be positively affected.

I hope you are enjoying the information and I look forward to sharing more with you next time, on different ways technology can be used to assess students. Thanks for reading. I would be happy to share ideas with you, feel free to contact me.