Fun & Formative Assessment
CommonLit -- CommonLit is a free collection of fiction and nonfiction for 5th-12th grade classrooms. Search and filter our collection by lexile, grade, theme, genre, literary device, or common core standard. Assign text-dependent questions to hold students accountable for high level reading and writing. Analyze student performance and compare class reports on key reading and writing skills.
Desmos -- Desmos wants to help every student learn math and love learning math. But “every student” is a lot of students. So they create digital math tools and let the Internet take them to anyone who wants them! Desmos has built the best-in-class HTML5 graphing calculator, which millions of students around the world use for free. The team also create activities on top of that calculator, helping students use a powerful tool to experience all the curiosity, beauty, and sense that math has to offer. Those activities were used so often by so many teachers around the world that the Desmos team decided to create an Activity Builder, helping every teacher create digital math activities that equal and exceed the activities created by the team themselves.
Go Formative -- This tool allows for immediate feedback. It allows the teacher to ask multiple choice, short answer, checklist, open ended, and picture-answer type questions. With the teacher providing the correct answer beforehand, the student can automatically see if they have successfully answered the question without asking the teacher. Data is provided in real-time for the teacher on a reports page. Great tool for vocabulary, DOK 1 and DOK 2 questions!
IXL -- IXL is an immersive K-12 learning experience that provides comprehensive, standards-aligned content for math, language arts, science, and social studies. The free edition allows for limited questions daily.
Kahoot! -- Kahoot! is a game-based learning platform and one of the world’s fastest-growing learning brands with more than 40 million monthly active users in 180 countries. Kahoot! makes it easy to create, discover, play and share fun learning games in minutes—for any subject, in any language, on any device, for all ages. Kahoot! allows teachers to quickly create fun learning games for students based around multiple choice questions. After creating the game, students can use any device to sign-in to the game ‘room’ using a unique code to complete lessons and compete against their peers.
Khan Academy -- Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. They tackle math, science, computer programming, history, art history, economics, and more. Their math missions guide learners from kindergarten to calculus using state-of-the-art, adaptive technology that identifies strengths and learning gaps. Khan Academy are also partnered with institutions like NASA, The Museum of Modern Art, The California Academy of Sciences, and MIT to offer specialized content.
Newsela -- Newsela is an education technology startup dedicated to transforming the way students access the world through words. Their team combines powerful technological know-how with real-world experience earned in the classroom, the newsroom, and the boardroom. They publish high-interest news and nonfiction articles daily at five levels of complexity for grades 2-12 using a proprietary, rapid text-leveling process. By combining relevant and interesting nonfiction content with standards-aligned assessments, Newsela gives educators the primary solution to dramatically improve students’ literacy skills for the 21st century.
Quizalize -- You build your own quiz, send it to your students, and get instant data about how everyone is doing. You can also turn your quizzes into a team game, and students can track how the two teams are doing in real time. The best part is that you can choose from 20,000 pre-made quizzes if you’re running low on time, and you and your students can take them on a laptop, computer, tablet, or mobile phone. Finally, Quizalize provides you with data about improvement over time.
Quizizz - Students play together, but each at their own pace. Gamfication elements like avatars, leader board and funny memes add to the fun! Review your work in the end. Find amazing quizzes made by other teachers, or create your own quizzes and share them with the world! Start a "Live" game in class, or assign Quizizz as a fun "Homework" task. You control the competition by toggling the leader board, timer and other settings. Note that this tool only uses multiple choice questions.
Quizlet -- Using Quizlet is an effective way to get your students further engaged in what they're learning both in the classroom and at home. Our site offers six different study modes that appeal to all types of learners, allowing students to use what works best for them and go at their own pace. As a teacher you can easily create Quizlet classes to share study material with your students quickly and track their progress. And with our team-based game, Quizlet Live, it's easy to get your whole class involved, learning the material and how to work together in the process.
ReadWorks -- The nonprofit ReadWorks provides K-12 teachers with what to teach and how to teach it—online, for free, to be shared broadly. We provide the largest, highest-quality library of curated nonfiction and literary articles in the country, along with reading comprehension and vocabulary lessons, formative assessments, and teacher guidance. Most importantly, everything ReadWorks does is based on proven cognitive science research, not unproven academic theory. ReadWorks delivers content, curriculum, and training to teachers and students.
Socrative - Socrative is your classroom app for fun, effective classroom engagement. No matter where or how you teach, Socrative allows you to instantly connect with students as learning happens. Quickly assess students with prepared activities or on-the-fly questions to get immediate insight into student understanding. Then use auto-populated results to determine the best instructional approach to most effectively drive learning.
