Sample Learning Activity

Tech Tool for Instruction

Coggle

A great tech tool to utilize during instruction to help students practice and make sense of the material is Coggle. Coggle is a software that allows students to collaboratively create mind maps. Students can work in small groups or collectively as a class in order to organize the instructional material learned in class and be able to see everyone's contributions and build from them. For this lesson, students could work in groups of 3 or 4 in order to create mind maps for the different states of matter, categorizing their basic properties and comparing the different states of matter.

Tech Tool for Formative Assessment

Crowdsignal

Crowdsignal is a great tech tool to formatively assess students quickly and efficiently. This application enables the teacher to create quizzes, polls, and other forms of formative assessment that can be answered by students on their digital devices. Once the assessment is complete, data breakdowns of the answers are automatically produced, so teachers can immediate use the data received from these assessments in order to optimize student outcomes in learning. Sorting assessments takes away valuable time from instruction, so immediately being able to analyze data in order to make well-informed and quick instructional decisions is imperative.

For example, if you notice that immediately all students have answered one of the questions wrong regarding a key characteristic of solid matter, you would be able to take advantage of whatever class time is left that same day to re-cover any important knowledge regarding this that did not get successfully conveyed in order to optimize student learning outcomes.

Tech Tool for Summative Assessment

Google Forms

For summative assessments, utilizing Google Forms will help you be able to optimize student learning outcomes. Google Forms is an easy way for educators to administer self-grading assessments and can utilize functions such as "locked mode" for Chromebooks that prevents students from being able to open any other tabs or applications on the device during the assessment. Google Forms boost similar advantages to other quiz and test making applications because it automatically organizes and generates useful data that is visualized in easy-to-read graphics that allows the teacher to save time, provide feedback immediately to students, and make informed, data-driven instructional decisions that will affect future lessons to optimize student learning.

In this lesson, the teacher may find an area of weakness in one area of the assessment and may wish to revisit some material during small groups in order to move on to the next instructional concept. Furthermore, students will be able to gain access to some of this data in order to reflect upon their knowledge and pursue review of concepts in order to understand the material more. Because this data is available immediately - unlike the average turn around time for a hand-graded assessment - students will be able to fill knowledge gaps while the material is still fresh and relevant.