The Ultimate List – 65 Digital Tools and Apps to Support Formative Instructional Practice There is no shortage of strategies, techniques, and tools available to teachers (and students) who use formative instructional practice in their classrooms. We’ve compiled an extensive list of 65 digital tools, apps, and platforms that can help teachers use formative assessment to elicit evidence of student learning. These tools and apps for formative assessment success give teachers (and students) many options and opportunities for classroom success. To get the most out of formative instructional strategies, check out our NWEA® formative practices workshops. And, share your tools, ideas, and thoughts with us, so we can keep this list growing and current! A free quiz game platform that allows teachers to create quizzes students take in real-time. There are many Twitter chats related to formative instructional practices that could be considered tools, as well.
The Power of the Formative Assessment The power of formative assessment is one of the things I most like about the process of the IBPYP Exhibition. The IBPYP Exhibition is a student-driven, culminating experience in the PYP. During the Exhibition, the teacher openly drops into a real facilitator role (even though they do this all the time). Formative assessment, or the assessment that drives our teaching, is so critical during Exhibition. How, as a teacher during the Exhibition, do I gather all of this juicy information about the students? I watch: Over the last few weeks, I have taken a lot of mental notes and have written a lot of notes about how effectively the students organize themselves. I listen: What kinds of questions are they asking me or others? I record: I take a lot of pictures. IBPYP Exhibition Voices from YIS Academics on Vimeo . The Exhibition has helped remind me how we don’t need standardized tests to tell us how our students are doing. Formative assessment drives us. Like this: Like Loading...
Assessment Section 4: Measuring for Learning Goal: At all levels, our education system will leverage the power of technology to measure what matters and use assessment data to improve learning. Measuring learning is a necessary part of every teacher’s work. Through embedded assessments, educators can see evidence of students’ thinking during the learning process and provide near real-time feedback through learning dashboards so they can take action in the moment.2 Families can be more informed about what and how their children learned during the school day. Technology-enabled tools also can support teacher evaluation and coaching. Educators and institutions should be mindful of whether they are measuring what is easy to measure or what is most valuable to measure. Continued advances in technology will expand the use of ongoing, formative, and embedded assessments that are less disruptive and more useful for improving learning. Approaches to Assessment Using Assessment Data to Support Learning
The Best Resources For Learning About Formative Assessment (Thumbs are one of my favorite forms of formative assessment) Be sure to read my Ed Week column, Ways to Include Students in the Formative Assessment Process. As the new school year approaches (we go back in two more weeks), I’ve been thinking a bit on how I can be a little more intentional and strategic in using formative assessment. For those who might be new to the term, formative assessments are ongoing practices that help both the teacher and student evaluate and reflect on how they are both doing, and what changes either or both might need to make to become a more effective teacher and learner (I’d love it if someone left a comment with a better definition). Again, for people who are new to these terms, formative assessments are often contrasted with summative assessments. Formative assessments are generally considered more useful to teachers, which is why I’m thinking about them. Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning About Formative Assessment: Do you understand?
Use Seesaw To Create A Learning Journal In Your Classroom How I Use Seesaw To Create A Learning Journal in My Classroom by Kelli Ohms, Special Education Functional Life Skills Teacher Being a functional life skills teacher, my class is not set up like a typical classroom. We started using Seesaw last November as a way to document and share the work my students were doing in the community and record evidence of the key academic skills they’re working towards. At first, my biggest challenge was teaching my students to add items independently, but now they enjoy adding new items to their journals, and even request to post unprompted! The biggest way Seesaw has helped my classroom is with parent communication. Now that I use Seesaw, Parents have loved getting real-time updates on what their students are working on in class and how they are making progress. For instance, I had a parent who did not think their child could count money. Increasing My Students’ Motivation Simplifying Documentation and Data Collection I would suggest Seesaw to everyone!
Metacognition Visible Thinking in the Digital Classroom While you are waiting.... 1. 2. Download any of the apps below that you need Please don't be discouraged if you know all these apps or none of them. Session Essential Questions 1. What does "making thinking visible" mean to you? 1. 2. 3. 4. *iPad Photo Courtesy of Kevin Honeycutt *What Makes You Say That? *Interpretation with justification 1. 2. 3. *Active Reasoning & Explanation Encourages Students to think about a question and share their thoughts with a partner. Tellagami 1. 2. *Setting the Stage for Deeper Inquiry What do you think you know about this topic? Step 1: Get your graphics in line Start with a student drawing, image, picture, graphic, or other piece of visual content. Skitch Great For: basic editing, cropping, labeling, highlighting, blurring (think kid's faces or personal info, license plate). Canva Great For: Creating infographics with pretty templates, icons & graphics. Some other Infographic Creators... 1. 2. 1.
5 Reasons You Should Seek Your OWN Student Feedback Yes, it’s scary. Yes, it’s easy to assume you already know what students think about your class, how well they’re handling the workload, what activities they like the most. Yes, it’s possible you know best. Still. If you’ve never asked students for serious, honest feedback, you’re missing something. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Start by asking good questions. Create a written survey you distribute to students. Is the work in this class too hard or too easy for you? That last question might seem like a throw-away, but it can elicit some of the most powerful and significant information you’ll get. Next, create optimal conditions for quality feedback. Distribute the survey at the right time and place. Finally, ACT on the feedback. Gathering information is useless if you do nothing with it. Talk. If you’d like something ready-made for gathering student feedback, I have prepared an excellent form you can use today: The “How’s It Going?” The “How’s It Going?” The “How’s It Going?” Like what you’ve seen so far?
Success criteria and rubrics This Professional Learning module explains the role played by success criteria (criteria for assessment) and explores rubrics as one example of success criteria. The learning intention of a lesson or series of lessons tells students what they should know, understand and be able to do, and the success criteria help teachers to decide whether their students have in fact achieved the learning intention. Importantly, the success criteria also answer the same question from the point of view of the student: How will I know whether I've achieved the learning intention? The term 'success criteria' was coined in the UK. Sometimes the success criteria might be just a series of dot points. For lengthy assessment tasks, however, teachers often use rubrics which will provide students with the success criteria and also with descriptions of a number of different levels of performance in relation to those criteria. The following links explore success criteria in more detail.
Reflecting on and refining assessment tasks It’s important educators understand where students are in their learning, and there are lots of ways to monitor this progress that can inform meaningful feedback and next steps. One example is an end of semester or end of unit assignment or portfolio task developed by the subject or classroom teacher. If you’ve designed one of these tasks, think about the process you undertook. Did the task hit the mark, in terms of quality and differentiation? At Canberra College, in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), staff use an evidence-informed framework to reflect on and improve the quality of their set assessment tasks. Deputy Principal Peter Clayden says it was introduced following a simple request to executive staff from a 'grassroots level' of teachers: ‘Help us make our tasks better’. ‘When you unpack the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, it basically tells you to do better,’ Clayden tells Teacher. He adds the model is improving the clarity of tasks for students.
Focusing on ownership of learning… | What Ed Said Day 1 of the new school year had a hundred and twenty teachers gathered in one place to think about student ownership! What could be better? In cross campus, mixed role groups, teachers took turns to talk about something they had learned during the holidays and how they had learned it. Conversations were varied and animated, as experiences and reflections were shared between people who don’t usually work (or play) together. *Imagine doing this as a whole year level or cross grade exercise… Our 2016 focus was introduced: Increase opportunities for ownership of learning. Teachers were asked to ponder the question – ‘What does student ownership of learning look like’? READ a blog post. How can we set a tone from Day 1 to give the message that we value student ownership? Having considered the ‘what’, the teachers now explored the ‘how’, using Ron Ritchhart’s 8 cultural forces as a scaffold: And finally, it was back to where we started: Like this: Like Loading...