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Technology Enhanced Formative Assessment

@joe_edtech/@LisaBerghoff

Early in my career, I was having a conversation with the best Division Head I've ever had (It isn't a secret - her name is Elaine Burcham, and she was Div Head for World Language/Social Studies/ELL/Health). I was excited about a lesson I had just taught, and I told her that the students had really seemed to grasp the concepts I was discussing. She said, "So, how do you KNOW that they got it?" I was going to talk about the answers that I got from some of the kids in the class or the fact that so many were nodding their heads in agreement, but she had me. I didn't KNOW. I certainly didn't know that they ALL had it. That one question from Elaine changed my practice.

From that point on I really spent some time studying formative assessment in the classroom. I believe strongly in Assessment for Learning, or "the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there" (Assessment Reform Group, 2002). Back in the day, that was something I did on paper. The process is so much simpler and can be so much more valuable now that we have Chromebooks and other networked devices to help us.

We recently had a PD session at DHS based on some research around Technology Enhanced Assessment for Learning. The researchers, Beatty & Gerace (2009), basically suggest some of our best teaching happens not when we instruct and then ask questions, but rather ask questions and use those as a context for sense-making and guided instruction.

The PD session looked at a variety of tools for quizzing, polling, ideation, direct classroom instruction, and facilitating discussion. Most of the tools have been written about by Lisa or myself at some point in the last couple of years, but many of the tools have been improved to make function better in the classroom. For instance:

• Google Forms were updated last year to make quizzing easier. They keep getting better and now allow for the inclusion of open-ended questions as well as objective questions.
• Poll Everywhere has not only added new output features (simple graphs, word clouds, etc) but has also upgraded to include a feature which allows teachers to collect screen names and moderate posts.
• Padlet has an entirely new platform that makes it easier to build, modify, and share projects.

The presentation below includes some of the discussion around formative assessment and a huge list of digital tools to use in the classroom. Each one of the tools includes a link to the tool itself and a link to instructions and examples. On slide 8, the "About" link will take you to the tool and the official documentation for the product. The "How To" link will take you to instructions. In many cases, the instructions come from featured articles in this Blog, but we've linked to videos or other teacher sites if there is new information out there.

How are you using Formative Assessment in the classroom? Are there some additional tools we should include? If so, please tell us about them in the comment box below.