 Us teachers today, who feel like testing is dragging us down. I think you're listening to the right webinar. In today's Wednesday webinar from ESU 8, I will attempt to give you some additional options of classroom tools for formative assessment. These technology-based tools are readily available, mostly free. They're fast and easy to incorporate in the classroom. They make learning fun. And most importantly, they make the process of assessment informative for the teacher. So it truly is assessment for learning and instead of assessment of learning. And that, by definition, is what formative assessment means. Unfortunately, this quote is what we often see happening in our schools today, that we promote the best practices in teaching, but push the worst practices in assessment. We can change that by just a few simple formative assessment tools. I'm going to highlight for you a few of them. This article highlights even a few more. It's an Ejitopia article from Vicki Davis. And I will share this link and others in the notes below this Wednesday webinar on our YouTube channel. But test scores should not be a surprise to the students. And teachers don't have to be mind readers. We just need a formative assessment toolbox. And you need to use it every day. Every day or definitely often. The six tools that I'm going to share with you are just scratching the surface of what's available, what we have access to, and what we should pull out of our toolbox and use from time to time. I'm going to highlight and show the differences and the similarities between Socrative, Kahoot, quizzes, Pear Deck, Nearpod, and Go Formative. But I know and I want you to realize that there are many more than what I'm going to show in the next half hour. We'll start with Socrative. And on each of these tools, you'll notice the URL for teacher setup, the URL or the way that students access the tool. And I've attempted to give a quick snapshot of my personal pros and cons of each of the tools. And then I'll give you a demonstration. Here's a really quick look into Socrative from both the teacher side and the student side. When I go to Socrative.com and sign into my account, I'm able to right away from the dashboard, start a quiz that's already been created, do a quick question, do a space race, which is playing a quiz as kind of a game show competition, and do an exit ticket. When I go to manage quizzes, I can create a new one from scratch, import one that's been shared with me from someone else, go to my quizzes and edit each one or duplicate them and download any reports. The live results tab is here. Let's go back to my dashboard and let's start a quiz. I'll just start the subjects and predicates review. And my options for delivery include student paste where they immediately get feedback, student paste where they're able to navigate through the quiz and then submit at the end, and teacher paste. For each of these, I can change these additional settings like disabling student names, randomizing the question order, the answer order, making it so that students can't see feedback or can't see the results when they're through. I'll hit start and I'll start this new quiz and wait for my class to enter the room and get started. On the student side, this is on an iPad. You can use the app if you want, but it really is just a direct link to that website, to Soccerative.com. From here, you put in a room number and the nice thing about Soccerative is it keeps your room number the same no matter which quiz you are currently in. So they'll enter in my room number, join the room. They will have to enter in their name here. I'll just put me. And instantly I start seeing that random questions, randomized questions are being offered to the student. I'll just select some answers here and submit it. Notice with each one, I do get the feedback immediately along with an additional explanation if it applies. And on my teacher side, you can see what each student is guessing and completing and their overall score. And I'm sorry, because I'm not reading the questions, I'm missing them all. But this is a nice progress to watch from the teacher side. And then of course, when it is finished, download those results. Another nice feature about Soccerative is the ability to take any quiz and download it as a PDF so that you can have that print copy or that print version of your quiz as well. So multiple choice questions, a lot of different options, that's Soccerative. The next one is Kahoot. And I was excited when this one came out because it definitely added the game-like feel in the competitive element to doing questions like my class was used to on Soccerative. Let me show you how this looks. For Kahoot, you'll notice that the URL for the teacher device is slightly different than the student device. For the teacher, you'll go to getkahoot.com, whereas the students would log in to kahoot.it. Now, when I say log in, it's as simple as entering a game pen and their name. It doesn't require an account, which is one nice feature. But Kahoot is completely teacher-directed. In other words, you need to go ahead and project your quizzes onto a projector and play them while their class is in session. Let me show you how it works. On the dashboard for Kahoot, when I've signed in with my account, I can see my Kahoot's that are saved here and I can play any of them. Let's go ahead and try this vocabulary one. When I hit play, then it tells me it's loading and I have the classic mode or the team mode. I can then see a game pen that will come up on the screen and that is unique to this instance of this quiz. So in other words, if I start another instance of it, that number will change. When I join the room with a nickname here, then the teacher sees how many students or players have joined and has control over when to start the game. I'll hit start. This one has 15 questions and it's teacher-controlled. So the question appears on the screen, eating way too much. I have time to think about what the answers might be. And then I might see a picture, an image, and the answer choices. On the student side, all they see are the symbols or the colors of the choices they're going to enter. I'll choose one and it tells me right away if I'm correct or incorrect and based on my speed and accuracy both. So I get them right and how quickly I got them right. It adds me to the leaderboard. When the teacher clicks next, my screen automatically or my name shows on the scoreboard and my screen automatically changes with the next question. So let's just get one wrong here. And you can see the difference in the student screen and now the leaderboard will display to reflect if anybody has risen above me. So that's how the Kahoot looks like when a quiz is in session. Back here on my dashboard, there's also a great feature called public Kahoot's where there's 7,300 plus Kahoot's that are shared by people where you can just do that quiz with your class straight from whoever's created it. You see, it looks similar and again, it'll give me a game pin that my students can enter. So there's a lot of great resources here which is a great place to start before you even create your own is just play some of the Kahoot's that other people have created. And you can search for topics here and see what's available as well. But the last thing I wanna show you on this Kahoot dashboard is super important. When you are at the home screen in the upper right hand corner, there is a wonderful PDF about created by educators about creating and playing the best Kahoot's. Download that, it's well worth your time at several pages, it's all free and it'll give you another guide to making these quiz discussion or survey experiences with your students. Come alive and be a lot of fun. For quizzes, the key difference is that the questions can be seen on student devices. So instead of having to look up at the projector screen, they can control the answers that they're inputting and see them right on their own device. This allows them for homework options as well. Let me demonstrate quizzes now. When you first try out quizzes, you'll notice right away that it's very similar to Kahoot and it is. But probably the biggest difference is the fact that the questions and the answer choices appear on the students device instead of the teachers. This allows you to assign a quizzes as homework for the students and allow them to complete it repeatedly or outside of class time. A lot of the rest of it is very similar. Here's the teacher side after I've logged into my account. I can search public quizzes and there's lots of them here as well, although maybe not as many as Kahoot yet. Here's my quizzes and so it has the quizzes I've created or saved to my account and I can start any of those. Here's where I create a new one. My reports lets me download past quizzes and even quizzes that I've left open as homework options. I can get those results and check on them later on. And so when I go ahead and go to some of my quizzes let's go ahead and get one going here. Let's do this technology in the classroom. I have the option to play it live or assign as homework. I can also share that link, put that link on Google Classroom or Canvas or some way so that students can remember how to get to it. I'll hit play live here. On the student end they will also log into quizzes.com and then click in instead of log in they'll join a game or alternatively they could go to join.quizzes.com. Here's the game code. I forgot to mention on the teacher end that these are the question settings. Whether or not you jumble the questions, jumble the answers, show the answers after each question or show the review at the end. You can turn these off and on as well whether the leaderboard is showing, whether there's a question timer, whether the memes show, so let's turn off a couple of these and whether there's music playing. Let's go ahead now and click proceed, get this quiz started so that we have the quiz code that will enter on the student side. Now they don't require a login, this can be good and not so good. If you do decide to share it on Google Classroom they would be required, students would be required to use their Google accounts to sign in. So that's one way to track them if you wish to do so. Okay and I'll enter my name here and join the game and just like Kahoot, I can see how many students have joined this live game and I control when it starts. Now you'll notice the questions being showed on the student device as well as the choices and we'll go ahead and choose one here. On the teacher board, I can see what each student has answered whether they got it correct or incorrect. I can also see the leader board as well but the students could be getting the questions all in random order, so in different order from their neighbors. Let's go a couple here that don't have points associated. I'm still seeing my rank on the leader board based on time and accuracy and I'm also seeing my feedback and what the correct answer is after each question. So that gives you a sense of what it's like to be in a quizzes quiz. I'll go ahead and end this game now and I wanna show you back on the main dashboard of quizzes that there is how you use the public quizzes. So if I were to search for some of the featured quizzes that are available or even one that's on a certain topic that I'm interested in, I can hover over the quiz and preview the questions on the side. Now I really like this because I don't have to go in and play the quiz or start the quiz. I can just get a quick sense as to whether or not this might match my needs and then if I do choose one, let's choose this multiplying decimals. I can play it live. However, what I would advise is to just duplicate it because by doing so, it'll save it into your my quizzes and then you have the ability to edit it. So maybe I didn't want to use all the questions or maybe I needed to add in a question that would better match my students' needs. So that is able to be done within my quizzes and then saved there as well. Great features, great options, kind of combining the other two tools, some of the things we've seen and that's quizzes. Paradeck is a slightly different formative assessment tool and that you mix in with your teaching the different assessment questions. This is tied to Google accounts and has a few free capabilities with a lot more available if you pay for the paid version. Paradeck.com does require Google accounts on both the student and the teacher end. So here's the teacher view at Paradeck.com. I'll sign in with Google and I'm gonna use my teacher account that I already have started. Let's go ahead and ignore this session that's already in progress. So you can see my quizzes that are saved here, different sessions that have been set into motion there, my account and add-ons. You do have the ability to create a new slide deck here and you can even upload Google slides or PowerPoint slides as a starting point. And there's oftentimes inside of the Paradeck app that they encourage you to upgrade to premium. I'm gonna try to just show you the free features as much as I can. On the student side at Paradeck.com they might be encouraged to go to the student login. I'm gonna use a secondary Google account here so that I can show you what it looks like for the student point of view and it's just waiting for a code. So it's already got me signed in with my name through my Google account. We're gonna do this Paradeck demonstration. I'll click start presenting and it's already in session. So let's just start a new one and those slides are coming up on the screen. It wants to make sure that my screen is connected to the projector and I do see it and now it generates that code for the students to enter in. Five letters and we hit enter. And just like the other tools we can see when students have joined but now we control the pace and we advance the slides and it matches on their screen as well. So this is the first slide. When I hit next, it shows the question maybe an image or a video to go with it and on the student devices they also see the question and they have the ability to answer their answer here. On Paradeck, you as the teacher decide whether you want the student responses to be viewable or hidden. So if you can imagine the whole class entering their numbers then they would show up as dots on this grid and I can actually change this answer. Let's say that I thought about it a little bit longer and I want to try a second guess and that will automatically then change it on the teacher end as well. So it works well for flexible dialogue and discussion. Now I'm going to advance the slide to the next question. This is a free response and again, if I show the student responses I'll see each student's input and answer and they have the ability to try again and post that and it shows that they change their mind from their first answer to their second. You can hide those questions at any time and again, advance the slides. Now another nice thing that you can do is do a quick question while a Pear Deck quiz is in session I can ask a question about this slide or about anything and on the fly, while I'm teaching my students I can maybe do a agree or disagree, thumbs up and thumbs down. We can have some slides in here that are just presentation content. We'll watch a video together, have a discussion and then really quick gauge where they're at with their thinking. So on the student device they drag their dot and on the teacher device we would see their responses and as soon as they change it and you have to imagine numerous dots here right now we only have one student in it obviously. So that's Pear Deck in a nutshell but it's a nice way to mix in both your teaching with your formative assessment right in the same set of class materials. Nearpod definitely captured my interest when it went from being simply an app to web based and so that any device can access a Nearpod lesson via nearpod.com. There's a lot of content available in the Nearpod content library much of which is free and I will demonstrate Nearpod to you now. Nearpod started as just an app when it opened up to be web based and anyone could access the lessons via nearpod.com it made it more accessible for students and teachers alike any device. It's very similar to Pear Deck in that there's a good portion of the content that's free but then you can upgrade for more paid features however I personally feel that there are more free features on Nearpod than Pear Deck. Another key difference is that students do not have to sign in with a Google account in order to access the Nearpod content. So teachers would sign in at nearpod.com I'm signed in right now to my free account I'll go to my library in here are all of my lessons that I've either created or saved to my library from somewhere else. For each lesson I can start a live session I can assign for homework so that students can complete the activity anytime, anywhere and I can edit each lesson and add additional questions or slides of information. So any of these are ready to go I'm gonna go back to the main screen so you can see the other options. One of the most exciting features about Nearpod in my opinion is the content library that's available. Now again not all of them are free so that I encourage you if you're searching here to search the filter and right away put on the free filter unless you're willing to pay for content you just pay for it on the teacher end and then give it to students as many as you wanna use it with. In the subject area and grades those offer additional features filters. Then you can search for specific topics and find really good starter lessons that are either made by publishers or content providers or maybe just give you an idea of a lesson that you can model your own after. Let's go ahead and check out one of the top free lessons that are here. Let's try out this money Nearpod lesson for grades one and two and when I click on it I can preview the slides and see if it matches my objectives for teaching. I'm going to go ahead and add it to my library now and now it shows up back in the my library. So along with the other lessons I now have the money lesson. I'm gonna start this as a live session so we can see how it looks on the student end and it gives me a pin which my students then enter into the nearpod.com website and they do not have to sign in if they just click join lesson or enter pin to join lesson. They can bypass that need to create an account which is nice. Here's my code and I'll go ahead and enter into this show. I do have to enter in my name and now I control it by the teacher device. So when I advance the slide it also advances it on the student side. So it lets us know here that there's gonna be a slideshow information to teach with to begin. You can see how it changes and I can be instructing students about the different coins and their values and students can actually navigate that slideshow independently of the teacher. Next up is a quiz. Here's a multiple choice example. So the student gets to hit go, decide which coin this is and the teacher device will then see what they answered. I can do several things here. I can navigate to additional slides with the bottom menu. I can definitely see all the students and what they answered. I can also share the results. If it would be a poll that I would want the students to see the results I can push it back to their devices. When I advance to the next slide it lets me know what's coming up and it changes it on the student device. In this case it's a video that they would watch independently with their headphones on. There's a bit of information and now a different type of question type. This is a draw it question type and so the students have the ability to actually use the drawing tools on their device and count up or add together how much the money is and then hit send to send it to their teacher and you can see that the student drawings in pretty close to real time are displayed. Any student that would be in the lesson right now would have a small screen showing the teacher what their response was and you can see it populating here and there's my 26 cents. And I would advance to the next slide and therefore advances for the students too. All right, so we will end this lesson and remove the students from the presentation. You can see that that happens over there and just one final reminder that if you're on your Nearpod home dashboard it's very easy to create. You just get these slides, these blank slides and on each slide you can add content you can add a web link URL information and you can add an activity and the question types are an open-ended question, a poll, a quiz, a draw it, fill in the blanks and a memory test for the draw question you can add an image in the background give instructions if you want or just use a blank file and a blank whiteboard page for the students to work out a math problem on or draw their response to your prompt. So that's this first slide then I would add another slide and it's very easy to create Nearpod lessons. Go Formative is probably the tool that teachers know about the least but in my mind it has the most extensive options. A lot of question types, a lot of delivery methods it's a great all-in-one formative assessment solution in my mind because it does so much however you might feel like it's a little more complicated but I'll let you be the judge of that. Let's take a look at Go Formative. The final formative assessment tool I'm gonna show you today is called Go Formative and I'm excited to show all of the many options it offers. It's entirely free and I definitely think it's a tool to add to your toolbox. To access it you go to goformative.com on my teacher side I've already logged in to my free account and I can visit my dashboard. Now here might be some of the quiz sets or the formative lessons that I've saved to my library as well as some that I have created myself. We are gonna go ahead and demonstrate the area and perimeter quiz that I just made up not too long ago. Here I have the option to edit it and add more questions to assign it and to go into live results mode or share it with other teachers. So there is a public library or there's publicly shared formative assessments inside of Go Formative and there's a lot of capabilities here for sharing them with others as well. If I assign it, I do have a couple of options here that are different than some of the other ones in that I can set up classes inside of my formative account and I can actually input student names ahead of time so that when I assign it to a specific class those students would get the notification that it was ready for them. In this case, since I'm doing it for PD purposes I'm just going to enable for everyone and make it publicly available so that anyone can respond without a login and they won't see their feedback or their scores. They're just taking it as a guest. However, it does generate a quick code. I can send out a link assigned on Google Classroom or use embed code. And on the student side since I don't want to create student accounts in this example, I will just enter this code into the quick code box. It's a little bit longer of a code but it does stay the same for this quiz so that makes it easy to assign and share. Let's go ahead and go. I do have to enter a name, a first and the last name if I bypass the sign up or the login with Google here. So I'll continue without logging in but I will put a first and the last name so that it lets me through. Now the students in this case I've chosen to let them see all four questions at once so they can take this formative assessment in any order and at their own pace. When they do enter a response for example on this first question they will go ahead and click their choice and then in the live results the teacher would see what everyone had answered. Actually even people that have taken this in the past but the newest response will show up soon. I can see the average score and what each student answered. Here's the me, me that is this current answer. I put an A area and it shows up that it's red. Let's scroll down to the second question in this one. You have a video to watch and then a drawing underneath of it. So after I listened to how they figure up perimeter and area then I would draw the rectangular figure that has the area of 24 square inches. This could be made to be as nice looking as they want it to but the general idea here is that their drawings are instantly displayed on the teacher's screen. Now on the teacher's screen I do have to navigate to each question individually and here are all my students drawings that they've entered. There's me right in the middle. You can see that it's instantly up there and students don't have to hit send or wait for the teacher to advance to the next question. On this question type question three students are asked to calculate the area and perimeter of each rectangle and then mark their answers on the side. This is honestly just a worksheet. It's a PDF. So Go Formative allows the teachers to add traditional worksheets to their questions and then students can annotate on top of them. This one might be a little bit hard because it's kind of small spaces but you could do this as a map where students would need to highlight or circle answers or it could just be work out the math problem one question at a time to give them more space and more room to submit their answers. And again, when we go to question three on the teacher's side we'll see everyone's submitted responses. Then as we scroll down the fourth question is just an enter your response type question and so students would actually be able to type and then the teacher would see all of those type written responses there. So Go Formative has some really great features in here. If I go back to the main dashboard on the teacher's side go on here's the submit button. There we go. So my work has been submitted. On the teacher's side there are some really great reports as well. You can find some pre-made quizzes in the public quizzes, view video tutorials. Here's where you set up your classes all inside of here and the community is up as a very top. So I encourage you to try out Go Formative. It might be a new tool that will just be enough to allow some flexibility in your teaching. Maybe help create some more blended learning experiences for your students and definitely give you some feedback that you as a teacher can help assess students' learning and take them to even greater depths of learning. And so there you have it. Six simple tools with options for maximum flexibility for formative assessment in your classroom. I've compiled a snapshot chart with several different criteria and the complete chart is available online at the shortened URL. Now this is obviously something that tools are often changing and you might have different opinions or updates. Please send them to me, kdeadsu8.org and I'll try to maintain this comparison chart. But it's an easy way to look at all of them side by side and decide which one you want to try tomorrow. So I'll conclude today with a reminder that if we design our lessons and we design our teaching with starting with the end in mind, this is important. The assessment of the learning, that summative assessment that we know we're reaching for with our learners. But then we plan backwards and that allows us to decide on our assessment for learning. All of these formative assessment opportunities along the way. And if we're incorporating many of these tools and experiences for our students, then assessment as learning approaches. I hope that you can see with these six tools for sure that students would be learning as they're completing them, as they're competing in them, as they're giving us as the educator, as the teacher information about what they know, they're also learning in the process. To me that's a win-win and it's the reason why that formative assessment practices can and should be improved on. I hope this gave you a few tips to get started in doing so. Thanks for listening.