FTT - Tech Tools for Reflective Formatives

 

How Do You Know Your Students Are Learning?

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

Assessing whether or not genuine learning is happening in any single moment has always been a challenge, and one that has been made infinitely harder with remote/hybrid learning. It can be so difficult to "read the room" and rely on your usual, informal checks for understanding when you're staring at a number of tiny pictures on your computer screen. While most students are returning to school, and we're slowly clawing our way back to full in-person learning, it's important to note that asking the class, "does that make sense," or "any questions" just won't cut it anymore. 

The best type of formative assessment gives students and educators time to be reflective about their work and their habits and the eventual feedback. While this time of the year may be a mad dash to get past the Cold War in US History, it's certainly worth giving students the opportunity to complete a formative assessment with adequate time to review feedback and to think hard about what they had just done, and what they can do to continue growing. 

How easy is it for students to hit submit on an assignment, and never look at it again (besides the score of course)? Or how often to we complain about students not reading our thorough feedback on essays that we spent hours writing? As a wrestling coach I've seen kids watch a recording of the previous night's match over and over again, pausing and rewinding at critical moments so that they could analyze and reflect on what went wrong and what went right so that they could be better. Students know that such reflection and self-assessment works. We just need to port that into our classrooms, and here are a few tech tools that can help:

PearDeck

We were excited as a district to add PearDeck premium last year and we've witnessed a lot of teachers reaping the rewards. The nice thing about the PearDeck/Google slides integration is that it give an easy way to give students an interactive relationship with the presented material, and for staff to keep that feedback for future use. Instead of asking students, "what do you think about situation x" you can prompt them through PearDeck, where students can individually formulate a response on their 1:1 device. From there you can show student responses anonymously to the class for review and further discussion, and SAVE their responses for future analysis.  Click here for a past blog on PearDeck.

Schoology Google Drive

Schoology's Google Drive LTI integration is one of the better functioning ones and a personal favorite of mine. It allows you to attach and integrate a Google Doc assignment into your Schoology gradebook. Here are some cool features of using this option:

• Creates a fresh, individual copy of the Google Doc
• Teacher can view student progress and give live feedback via Google Doc
• Unsubmit and return work with comments as needed. 

Just create a Schoology assignment, and click on the "Google Drive Assignments" option to assign from app. Then students merely need to click on the assignment and it'll bring them to their personal copy.

No matter how you decide to integrate technology into your classroom, remember: it's not about the device or technology. It's always about leverage those tool via good teaching and pedagogy. Find the right formative tools that work for you and if you find a good one, comment below!