Digital Assessments: More than an online quiz

There is a sea of assessment tools out there in the EdTech world: Kahoot, Google Forms, GoFormative, Nearpod, Socrative... the list goes on and on. All of these types of tools are good. They can give students instantaneous feedback, and can become more engaging. The but the question is, how are these tools more than just a digital worksheet?

There are many reasons that districts jump on the 1:1 digital bandwagon. The biggest arguably being that technology allows for great support of Personalized Learning. So is taking a quiz and putting it in Google Forms personalized learning?

EdTech gives us the opportunity to add Voice & Choice to how the students want to be assessed. We now have audio, video, graphic design, and many other tools at our students fingertips!

Thinking "Outside the box" on Assessments

1. Graphic Design Displays - Designing posters and infographics no longer takes hours of time with scissors, construction paper, and poster board. Students can use tools like Canva, Adobe Spark, & Piktochart to easily create graphics to display and/or explain their learning. Wouldn't your students take more ownership in their learning if they were developing a social media graphic about the causes of the Civil War as opposed to filling out a google form?

2. Video & Multimedia - There are so many video and media tools available these days. Screencastify, Explain Everything, Educreations, SeeSaw, and FlipGrid are all simple tools for students to record with. With these tools, we can ask every student to explain how they solved a problem as they submit an answer. When the student reviews their video explanation before submitting, they are checking their metacognition! How often does a multiple choice test do that for us?

3. Global Publishing - This option comes with a disclaimer - students under the age of 13 are not legally permitted to use social media accounts.
For our middle - high school students, we can allow them to share their learning through a blog, mini blog (twitter), or other social media outlet. This allows them to ask for feedback from others. Think about the effect of meaningful conversations with others, including experts, would have on the learning of a topic.

Digital Tools for Flipping Your Classroom

This post originally appeared on The FETC: Future of EdTech Insiders Blog

At FETC, I was delighted to attend a session by high school foreign language teacher Rachelle Dene Poth titled, Flipping Classrooms: Trading Spaces and Places Digital Tools and Ideas to Empower Students. During the session Rachelle gave attendees several resources for flipping learning for students.

However, before those digital tools were given, Ms. Poth set the stage for the why she wanted flipped learning for her students. She explained that she had a need to connect students to her classroom resources no matter their location. If a student is absent or forgets a textbook at school, they can still access the content/resources to stay current with the students in class.

Another aspect of Rachelle’s presentation was explaining the importance of putting the students in the driver’s seat. She gave examples of how she has students create their own presentations, quizzes, infographics, and more. Ms. Poth even discussed the benefits of using these student made digital projects as resources for other students to learn from. This made me think of the SAMR model and how transformative learning can be for our students when they have the flexibility to choose a tool that lets them display or explain their thinking. Rachelle’s suggestion for this was to take small steps: “pick a class to try something with, set parameters and have students create their own.”

Rachelle had many wonderful tools to share. As you look over the following list, it is important to remember to start small. Pick one or two that sound interesting, and try them out. It is easy to get overwhelmed with all of the tools out there, so take small steps for success. Ms. Poth’s presentation and handouts will also be linked in this article as well.

Now, on to the tools!

Tes Teach with Blendspace: A building tool that allows teachers to curate content for lesson delivery packages. Websites, powerpoints, Google Docs, YouTube Videos, and more all in one convenient location for your students. All of these resources can inserted right through the Blendspace search bar, or connecting your own accounts. Simple quizzes can also be created. No more multiple tabs from several links, just one clean lesson flow. The lessons can be shared several ways: a classroom in Blendspace, Google Classroom, or any other method of link sharing. Works on all devices.

Today’s Meet: A backchannel tool that allows for written conversations between teachers and students. The beauty of this tool is that it allows for a full transcript to be saved and printed. This helps keep a log of everything that was discussed in the session. An excellent tool for teachers to use during virtual office hours for students.

Quizizz: Similar to Kahoot, quizizz is a fun competitive way for students to take a quiz. In Quizizz, quiz questions are actually on the screen of the device, not just the screen in the front of the room. This allows for a quiz to be a homework assignment as well. As discussed above, having students create a Quizizz themselves based off of the content in your classroom can be a great way where students can be creators not just consumers with their devices.

Nearpod: A lesson delivery system that gives the teacher control of the student’s screen. Think of sharing a Powerpoint file or Google Slide with your students, but being in control of when the slides change on their screen. Nearpod also allows for interactive questioning, where student answers can be anonymously shared with classmates.

Formative: A student response system allows for multiple question types to be asked. Students can answer questions by multiple choice, drawing, short answer, and more.

Educreations & Explain Everything: Two very similar student explanation tools. Just as their titles imply, students create (by hand or typing) and record their voice to explain their thinking. These can be powerful tools for meta-cognition in and out of the classroom.

EdPuzzle: A student response video tool that allows teachers to bring in YouTube or other videos and add questions to them. These questions are added during the video so as the student watches, it will pause and ask the question.

Buncee: A presentation tool with creative interactive elements. Buncee allows you to add animated characters, videos, and voice over to each slide that you are working on. As with Educreations/Explain Everything, a child can use the voice over to explain the content that they place on each slide.

There were other resources shared by Ms. Poth at the workshop and below you will find the links for them. She is also on twitter, and is well worth the follow! @rdene915

Flipping Classrooms Google Doc with Links

Flipping Classrooms Presentation Link

Supporting ELL Students with EdTech

Over the last 13 years, I have spent my career in education in the Springdale School District in Springdale, AR. The 3rd and 4th grade classrooms I have taught were at about a 75% or higher ELL (or ESL) population. As I have seen the boom in EdTech over the recent years in our district, I have really paid attention to the technology tools that are available to help our ELL students succeed.

There are several tools out there to provide the scaffolding and support to these students, but I am just going to focus on a few of them for this post: Translation Tools, Auditory Tools, and Recording Tools. These tools are nothing new in the world of technology, but as more students are able to access technology in the classroom they should not be overlooked.

Translation Tools:

Google Translate
 used on iPhone

The translation tool I have seen the most success with is Google Translate. It works very well in multiple ways:

• Tablet/Phone App: The app allows you to point your camera at a sign and translate it to a different language. It also allows you to speak one language into the device and it will translate and speak out loud in another language.
• Google Search/Website: If you search google translate, a text box will appear at the top of your search results that allows for instant text translation. translate.google.com also does this function.
• Chrome Extension: The Google Translate Chrome extension allows you to change the language of any website you are looking at with a few simple clicks, never leaving the web site you are viewing. 

Auditory Tools: 

I am defining auditory tools as any type of tool that reads texts to students. Many of our ELL students comprehend speech at a much higher level than they are able to read (in English). The use of auditory tools will allow students to hear the content needed even if they are struggling to read the words on the screen. There are several text to speech apps out there, but the following have worked best for me:

• iPad/iPhone: I simply use Siri. This is activated through the accessibility menu within settings. Students can change voice accents and also speech rate.  
• Chrome: I prefer the extension SpeakIt! Voice accents and speech rate are also controllable. 

As mentioned, I realize that these may seem like fairly simple tools in today's high tech classrooms, but the importance of what these tools can bring to our ELLs should not be looked over.

Recording Tools:
Apps that record student voices, screens, and actions can make a great impact with our ELL students in two ways: comprehension/assessment and reflection/meta-cognition.

Comprehension/Assessment - Giving ELL students the option to record their voice to explain a concept and turn it in to their teacher is critical. Our ELL students comprehend information at high levels, many of them just have difficulty putting their learning and understanding into writing. Why not allow them to record their understanding verbally and send that to the teacher for a comprehension check/assessment? There is a relatively new website/app called Recap just for this purpose.



Reflection/Meta-cognition For decades, coaches have recorded players on the field and reviewed it with their players. Music directors have recorded performers and had them listen back for reflection. This can now be done with every single student in the classroom. Having students record their thoughts through screen-casting, audio notes, or video will allow them to reflect upon their learning and presentation skills. This is only effective if part of the assignment is that the student listen back to their recordings for that reflection piece. There are so many great tools out there, but a few to check out are:
Chrome Extentions: Screencastify and Snagit Chrome Extensions.
iPhone/iPad: Book Creator, Draw and Tell, Educreations, Explain Everything, Seesaw, Shadow Puppet, Tellagami, and simply just use the camera. (If you would like to learn more about some of these apps, then check out my post 5 iPad apps for Student Presentations and Meta-Cognition)

As with everything with EdTech, it is important to not get wrapped up in the "bells and whistles" of an app/site, but what it really offers your students. In the case of our ELLs, thinking of how these tools can support language development should be our number one goal.

Student Response Tools for the Digital Classroom

As classrooms become more connected through technology, teachers have several choices when it comes to selecting a Student Response Tool to use with student devices. Whether your class is 1:1 with a specific device (Chromebooks, iPads) or you have a BYOD environment (Bring Your Own Device),there are many websites that work as an excellent option for teachers to gather responses from their students.

As always in my blog, I will just name a few of the many tools that I have found beneficial. These will be listed in alphabetical order:

AnswerGarden:

AnswerGarden is a response tool that allows a teacher to ask a single question and makes a word cloud out of student responses. It is intended for short answer questions, about 20 to 40 characters long. It does not record which student gave which answer. It is more so intended as a brainstorming tool. The user can hover over any of the answers to see how many times it was answered. No accounts are needed for the site, and each AnswerGarden that a teacher creates holds its own URL and code for students to type in to. It has an iPad app that is easy for students of all ages to use.

Nearpod

Nearpod has many features beyond collecting student responses. It is a teacher presentation tool that allows the teacher to control what is on the screens of the students via WiFi. The teacher can set up a presentation like they would in Google Slides, Keypoint, or PowerPoint, and they an embed question types into the slide. Students sign in through a class code. Draw it, Fill in the Blanks, Polling, Exit Slip Quiz, and Open Ended questions can be asked. When the lesson is over, the presenter can download the answers that students gave. Nearpod is free, but has an upgrade to "Gold" as well. The dash board is simple to use, and many teachers share their presentations for others to use in the library.

Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is a great option for the BYOD environment. There are several ways for students/participants to join a poll, including texting through their phone. Poll Everywhere shows real time results in a bar graph on the teacher dashboard. While it would work best as a multiple choice response system, the teacher can also ask open response questions as well.


Socrative

Socrative is an excellent site/app for giving tests/quizzes to students. The students sign in through a class code and the teacher can choose to give a student paced quiz or the teacher can control the pace of the quiz as well. As you can see, there are 3 other options as well.
Quick Question: Allows instructors to ask their students questions "on the fly."
Space Race: Students take a teacher created quiz in groups as a competitive game.
Exit Ticket: Has 3 generic questions for the end of the lesson for students to answer.

After the teacher chooses to close the session, a report can be downloaded, printed, or added to Google Drive as a Sheet.

These are only a handful of the great apps/websites that are available to students and teachers to collect responses in real time. This allows for faster student feedback, and easier classroom management. Other tools worth trying are: Kahoot.it, TodaysMeet, Zaption, and EduPuzzle.

Using Zaption or EDpuzzle: Teaching Students HOW to Watch Videos

I came across an article published by Gaggle titled The Biggest Mistakes Teachers Make When Flipping Their Classrooms by Jackie Myers. A quick read that is well worth your time. It points out a few mistakes teachers make when they begin to flip their classroom. One of which really stood out to me. "Not teaching students HOW to watch videos."

For decades we have been using technology within the school to show educational videos to our students. From reel to reel to VHS to DVD and now to sources like YouTube, students of all ages have viewed videos in their classroom. In May, ISTE tweeted that "40% of students use online videos to help with homework." Because of these facts, it is easy for teachers to think that students automatically already know HOW to watch videos to gain information. The truth of the matter is, students need guidance and modeling if they are expected to watch a flipped lesson, or educational video, and have a firm grasp of the content that was on the screen.

This can be done in several ways in the classroom, but there are a couple of tools that could be used to accomplish this task: Zaption and EDpuzzle.

Zaption and EDpuzzle are two sites that allow a teacher to take a video and insert questions or comments as the video plays for the students. These are both excellent tools when it comes to using videos in the classroom.

Of course the questioning options are a great. The teacher can ask open response or multiple choice questions and collect data. This is really allows the technology to be used at a new level it hasn't before. Students have the time to stop and review video material before answering the questions. The previous way of whole group viewing obviously didn't allow for this.

However, for the idea of teaching students HOW to watch videos, the commenting options are fantastic. The teacher can simply add comments to the video for the students. Students could then write those comments down on what ever note taking method they desire. This would be a great way to model for students either face to face, or in a flipped environment.

Both platforms import videos from a variety of sources, such as YouTube. They both also allow you upload videos that you have created.

Example of EDpuzzle


Example of Zaption

Tracking Student Work in Google Docs

Many teachers are really enjoying the fact that Google Apps for Education allows their students to work collaboratively. One of the many concerns of students working together has always been, "How can I tell which student has done what work?" Well thanks to the revision history in Google Docs, it is easy to see who has done what work, and when they did that work. This is a great assessment tool and will keep students accountable during collaborative work.