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Checking in on learning
Checking in on learning
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
What are ways teachers can help learners to achieve learning goals at their own pace?
They can use polls and exit cards to check in on what students have understood and what questions they have.
Formative assessments are aligned with learning objectives and students receive immediate feedback when assessment occurs. This encourages students to return to challenges until they feel confident.
Polls and Exit Tickets
Polls and Exit Tickets
Plickers is an app that requires no technology from students. You need one tablet or smartphone. Download a set of Plicker cards for multiple choice polling. Use your cell phone to capture student responses by scanning the room.
Here’s how Plickers work: You sign up for a free account. You create a class, assigning a number to each student. Plickers gives you a unique scannable image for each student that you print on a piece of paper.
Each student’s image means something different depending on how they turn it: Facing one way, it means “A.” Facing another way, it means “B.” And so on, allowing for four possible answers. This lets you ask an endless, flexible amount of multiple-choice questions, and students can answer every one with that same sheet of paper, depending on how they hold it up.
To gather responses, you simply hold up your smartphone or other iOS or Android device equipped with a reader, scan each student’s card in one smooth flow, and the results are immediately collected in one spot on your device. You can decide if the graphs will show each learner's answer or an aggregate of responses.
Watch the video tutorial to learn more about Plickers.
$3.99 CAN
You can ask an open-ended question. The app costs $3.99 but you can use this tool for free on the website.
You do not need to create an account. To get started go to the AnswerGarden homepage and click "create AnswerGarden." On the next screen you will enter a question or statement for your students to respond to. Before sharing your AnswerGarden you can turn on moderation of responses and set an admin password if you want to be able to edit and make changes. Students can also create AnswerGardens.
You can share your AnswerGarden link or embed the AnswerGarden into a blog or website. With an AnswerGarden embedded into your blog, people can answer and see their responses appear in a word cloud. Try it...
is game-like and somewhat competitive. I put this first because lots of people are familiar with this in a social context.
You can create a game or quiz with a set of simple multiple choice questions. The person - or team - who has correct answer first gets his, her or their name displayed. It feels a bit like a cross between a pub quiz and Trivial Pursuit but faster.
It is fairly easy to use so students can create their own quizzes for the group. To create a set of questions you need to create an account. Just ignore the page that asks you to pay. Go back to the main page and choose Create. You do not need an account to play the game. You open the app and open the PIN to play. The app plays music and uses sound effects.
is similar to Kahoot! Like Kahoot, students play your quiz games on their laptops or tablets by going to the Quizalize website then entering their names and a class code. Students are awarded points for correctly answering questions quickly. Students are given feedback instantly on every quiz question that they answer. A total score is presented to students at the end of every quiz.
Creating quizzes on Quizalize is a simple process. To get started just name your quiz and tag it with a subject label. As you write each quiz question you can include a picture and up to four answer choices. You can specify a time limit of 5 to 120 seconds for each question.
Applications for Education
One of the better aspects of Quizalize is found in the results page that you see as a teacher. The scores for each student appear on your screen in one place. On the results page you can quickly identify the questions that gave students the most difficulty in terms of correct answers as well as time needed to answer each question.
More from Free Tech 4 Teachers.
Go to Quizalize, choose I'm a student and enter the code hkx5471.
You can use Socrative for formative assessment that is a little more challenging that Kahoot! or Quizalize. You can see graphs instantly showing overall class response and can also get a spreadsheet of individual results to download.
Teachers can create timed quiz game activities that accept typed responses, true/false and multiple choice questions. Teachers can set an answer key. The typed response option helpful if you want to create an activity where students need to spell words or phrases correctly.
Students can work individually at their own pace, as a group at a pace that you set, or in teams at a pace that you set. You can use the same room code for all the activities you create so students need only one pin code.
Socrative has a dedicated exit ticket mode.
Quizzes
Quizzes
is a tool that allows you to add quizzes to videos and turn a video into a lesson.
You can search for educational videos and or upload your own videos to use as the basis of your lesson. EDpuzzle has an online classroom component that you can use to assign videos to students and track their progress through your video lessons. Within EDPuzzle's editor you can select portions of videos for students to watch.
You pick a video, edit or crop, add audio notes/tracks, add quizzes, and add a no skipping feature. Watch this video for assistance and visit this EdPuzzle resource site for teacher resources.
After a few years EDpuzzle remains at the top of my list of recommended tools for creating flipped video lessons. It is a neat tool that allows you to add your voice and text questions to educational videos. On EDpuzzle you can search for educational videos and or upload your own videos to use as the basis of your lesson. In your EDpuzzle lessons you can make it a requirement for students to answer a question before moving forward in the video. EDpuzzle has an online classroom component that you can use to assign videos to students and track their progress through your video lessons.
On Quizlet you can make your own flashcards or study from publicly shared sets of flashcards. You can create flashcards by entering information for each card individually or import information from a text document. It is useful for studying vocabulary, acronyms and idioms.
You can study a card set in different ways including playing a couple of games and this is the advantage of Quizlet over other similar flashcard tools. Users have a "dashboard" where they can track the flashcards they've made, public sets added to their collection, and track the flashcards they've studied.
To learn more about using Quizlet, check out this short demo video.
This is a free resource where you can create a quiz. Noone has to register. There is an optional registration that requires a small fee ($20 US per year) if you decide to have more features.
Click "make a test" then pick a name for your test and set an administrative password. After you choose an administrative password, Testmoz assigns your test its own unique url. That's the url you will give to students to take your test. You can use a password code so only your students can take the quiz.
Features include: no ads, four question types, and detailed reports which can be exported to and spreadsheet (csv). Students will see their score and correct or incorrect answers.
Registration (optional) requires a small fee if you decide to have more features.
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