Formative Assessments - Checking for Student Understanding

Formative Assessments - Checking for Student Understanding

As teachers help their students grow in understanding and learning, they "take a pulse" during lessons to make sure students are understanding and grasping the concepts. The idea, of course, is to  make sure that once students reach the end of a unit of study or the end of a school year, they will show mastery of the content. In the past, teachers would verbally ask the students and most would nod their heads. Oftentimes, when teachers probe deeper they would find the students really didn't understand and would adjust teaching accordingly.

In classrooms of today, teachers have a plethora of devices (whether BYOD environment or 1:1) for students to use to show understanding. There are many choices for teachers as well from Socrative, Nearpod, Kahoot, Quizizz, and goFormative. Even for classrooms without devices, teachers can use their tablet or phone and Plickers.

I met with teachers this week to show them two of the above-mentioned tools: Plickers & Quizziz.

Plickers is super easy to use provided the teacher has a tablet or smartphone available. Go to the site, create your account and add your students. Next, print the cards. The cards can be used for multiple classes, so for those of you in secondary, you can use this tool as well. You can verbally ask questions or embed them in your presentation. When you are ready to ask the question, simply open the app on your device, select the question, and choose scan. You will see the student's name pop-up on your screen and their answer choice will be recorded as you use the camera to scan the cards. Plickers work for multiple choice and true-false questions. You will need to teach your students how to hold the card and not to turn the cards while you are scanning, otherwise their answer will be changed.

Quizizz is one of my all time favorites. Why you ask? Well, if you ever played Kahoot, you know how much fun that is and how it engages students. Students even love to create quizzes for their classmates. Quizizz is similar except, wait for it...the questions display on the student devices! You don't have to project the quiz and this allows students to work through questions in a different order than their peers and at their own pace. Points are still awarded for speed and correct answers. Students also will see memes after each answer. You can search many of the public quizzes or create your own. You also have the choice to duplicate a public quiz and edit to suit the content you are assessing. Quizizz also provides the option to let the students complete the quiz as homework. You select the date and time the homework quiz needs to be completed. And finally, Quizizz is customizable as you can see from this image.

 

Take these tools for a test run with your students and let me know what you think. My presentation is below.

Cross posted from Teresa's Technology Thoughts. 

Google DriveTemplates, Oh My The Possibilities

Have you experienced the latest changes with the core Google Apps? Now when you start a new document, you have the opportunity to select from templates similar to starting a new doc in Microsoft Word or Pages.

As you can see from this screenshot, you can still choose a blank document, but you have the option to choose templates from various categories. And, wait. for.  it.  You can do this with Slides and Sheets as well.

This is awesome for me because I am always creating new templates for Slides. To get to all the goodness, click the home icon for the particular App you are working in located in the top left-hand corner. For example, in a Google Doc click the blue box with the white lines.


For more Google Goodness, read Google Docs and Classroom, your school year sidekicks.  

Cross post from Teresa's Technology Thoughts.

Using an External Camera on a Chromebook

Using an External Camera on a Chromebook

Sometimes you just need the added flexibility that an external camera gives you.  You may want to shoot a stop animation video with the Stop Motion Animator app, or shoot an action scene withWeVideo, or scan a QR Code taped to a wall.   In some of these cases the application will have an option to switch to a different camera built into the UI, but in most situations that is just not the case.  Below are step-by-step directions for switching between cameras using Chrome's system settings.

Step 1:

Click on the three horizontal lines (referred to as the "hotdog" by Chrome developers) in the upper right corner of your chrome browser, then click Settings.

Step 2:

Scroll to the bottom of the setting menu and click the Show advanced settings... link.

Step 3:
Under the Privacy section in the advanced settings, lick the Content Settings... button.

Step 4:
Scroll down to Media section and select the external camera from the dropdown menu beside the Camera heading.

Done.  Don't worry, this change is not permanent, your Chromebook will automatically switch back to the default camera when the external camera is unplugged. 

Crossposted from Have Technology, Will Travel.