New ways to Assess Students

Heading for Tomorrow Land!

Hope everyone had a great winter break. It's hard to believe another semester has begun.

This post is a bit late because I am currently at the Future of Educational Technology Conference (FETC) [formerly the Florida Education Technology Conference] in Orlando. It's a great place to see what teachers are doing with technology in the classroom. I am feeling a bit overloaded from all of the informative and thought provoking sessions.

One of my favorite presenters, Leslie Fisher, talked about two relatively new assessment apps Quizizz and GoFormative.  Quizizz is similar to Kahoot! in that it's an online, multiplayer, timed game, which can be accessed via any device. One major difference is the students can see the question and the answer on their device. The students also see a point total for each question which diminishes as time passes. Leslie had us take a Dr. Seuss quiz to see how it worked. I found it a bit easier than Kahoot since I didn't have to remember the color and/or shape of the answer.

GoFormative is more like a traditional way of assessing students with a few great twists. It's difficult to explain verbally how this app works, so here's a very quick video -

This app appears to be a blank slate for creating a wide variety of assessments, which teachers can easily grade and provide feedback. You aren't limited to multiple choice questions like Quizizz,  Kahoot or Plickers. Students can type responses to open ended question and even draw answers. Hopefully the developers will add the ability to dictate answers. What's really cool is you can actually watch the students as they respond.

I will be discussing other apps and gadgets I learned at about FETC in future posts. I don't want to overwhelm anyone. So take a look at these two promising apps and try them out on your students!