Top Tips, Tools and Techniques for Easy Formative Assessment
a Talk with Tony Vincent
From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis
Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter
A secret to great teaching is to understand what students know. I’ve had times when one or two students begged me to move on because what I was teaching was “so easy” or they were “bored. When I did, I would discover that the rest of the class did not master the material and I had moved on too quickly! We all struggle to know what students know “in the moment” so we can adjust our teaching. We need them to master the material. We need to teach it. But how can we know what they know without depending on hand raising and verbal feedback from just a few students? Formative assessment is the answer. Formative assessment can supercharge your classroom learning. Technology can make formative assessment easier for you. Lesson flow.
Formative assessment gives us the ability to quiz every single student in the class. Every teacher should have one or two formative assessment tools that are part of their lesson flow. In today’s show, you’ll get lots of options. Find one or two that work for you and start using them.
I would go so far to say that formative assessment is one of the greatest gifts of education technology to the classroom. A teacher with a smartphone has amazing tools in hand. Used properly, they can save time and help you understand students better.
My question is why more teachers don’t use these tools. I guess they don’t realize the time savings. One of our biggest problems as teachers is not having enough time.
Here’s how I saved time using these tools. When I used to teach binary numbers, it used to take me 2-3 hours a night to grade the quizzes. (After all, binary numbers is all 1’s and 0’s. That is it. So, I also made mistakes.) Now, the moment a student hits a button on the last question, the quiz is graded, and I can go over what they missed with them! It is fantastic.
Let’s dive deeper into formative assessment in today’s show! I challenge you to find ONE tool and try it out. (Listen to the show and check out the links at the bottom of this post.)
Gradecam – Today’s Sponsor
If you visit Gradecam from this blog post, you can get a 60-day free trial. You can also listen to a bonus episode I recorded about the “Biggest Formative Assessment Mistake that People Make” with Tony Vincent.
Show Notes:
- What is formative assessment?
- How can technology empower a teacher to ask the whole class a question and get their answer?
- How does a formative assessment fit in the moment of teaching?
- What are some examples of technology and formative assessment in the classroom?
- What mistakes do many teachers make when they use Plickers in the classroom?
- How can teachers collect open ended questions from students?
- How can word clouds help you visualize data at the beginning of a unit of study?
- How does formative assessment give every student voice?
- How can students share using drawings and images?
- How can we have evidence of learning in the moment?
Formative Assessment Tools and Blog Posts Mentioned in this Show:
- Tony Vincent’s Formative Assessment blog post
- Gradecam – they are giving a 60 day free trial
- Socrative
- Plickers
- Kahoot
- Google Forms
- Poll Everywhere
- GoFormative
- Nearpod
- ClassKick
- Time Magazine Article mentioned in the show
Who is Tony Vincent?
Tony Vincent likes to learn, teach, and make things. Since 1998 Tony been a pioneer in digital learning, and he continues to help educators use technology for teaching and learning. @tonyvincent
The post Top Tips, Tools and Techniques for Easy Formative Assessment appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!
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via Vicki Davis at coolcatteacher.com. Please also check out my show for busy teachers, Every Classroom Matters and my Free teaching tutorials on YouTube.
