Fantastic Formative Assessment Tools that Give Great Feedback Formative assessments are an important way to meet our students' learning needs. When we can see what our students know (or don't know) we can better adjust our teaching to meet them right at their level. Beyond giving feedback, the best formative assessments help students recognize and value the process of learning, not just the outcomes.
Quandary Home Page Quandary is an application for creating Web-based Action Mazes. An Action Maze is a kind of interactive case-study; the user is presented with a situation, and a number of choices as to a course of action to deal with it. On choosing one of the options, the resulting situation is then presented, again with a set of options. Google for Educators are very popular with education for many reasons, one of which is the ease of management and deployment. The Admin Console allows staff to manage apps, user settings, devices settings and much more. Here are some tips and best practices for settings in the Admin Console. The Admin Console is relatively easy to use, although some settings can be hard to find.
Free Video Chat & Conferencing Tools and How to Use Them Like a Boss Tips and Resources for Using Free Video Conferencing Tools in Your Classroom Video conferencing and chat tools can be a wonderful instructional resource, as most educators know. You can bring the outside world and guests into your classroom, enable a sick or disabled student to present from home and interact with the class, get to know online students better and have more constructive conversations than voice alone permits. Knowt - Quickly Turn Documents Into Practice Activities to Share With Your Students Knowt is a free service for turning documents into flashcards, quizzes, and other review activities. I featured Knowt in a blog post last year and again earlier this year. Back then it had to be used by students on an individual basis. Since then Knowt has developed a teacher platform that you can use to develop activities to directly share with your students.
Know Students Better: 17 Tools for Formative Assessment When teachers know their students well, they can build strong connections that lead to better learning. Knowing students’ interests, strengths, and weaknesses help teachers tailor learning experiences for their students. Formative assessment involves the teacher collecting information about what students know, don’t know, and want to learn. This information takes many forms, including observations, exit tickets, discussions, games, and quizzes.
The Best Free Online Calendars: 7 Options Compared You don’t need lots of fancy productivity tools. If deployed correctly, a simple online calendar should suffice for most of your organizational needs. There are lots of free online calendars to choose from. At one end of the scale, there are well-known apps like Google Calendar. LinoIt – Digital Educational Tools Lino is a virtual message center. You can create an online bulletin board in which “sticky notes” can be posted. It is important to know that you have control over who can post sticky notes. You also have control over your students posts by instructing them on how to post. Canvases can have cork or various fabric like backgrounds, and stickies can be one of 10 pastel colors with tags, icons, colored fonts in varying sizes, and a due date (which adds them to a task list). Users can embed in each sticky an image, a file for download, or a link to videos hosted by YouTube, Vimeo, or Ustream.
Bringing it back to the classroom Image by Carla Arena for eltpics One of the first ELT blog posts I ever wrote was for an incredibly tall, almost Scottish-looking (blood runs thicker…) chap from Brasilia. We’d ‘met’ online, as he is an integral part of the vibrant, dynamic and incredibly friendly Brazilian EFL ‘set’ (more posts to come soon from other BRAZ-TESOL stars ;) ) and he’d subsequently invited me to write about Sugata Mitra, Neil Postman and Scott Thornbury (a mighty trio, if ever there was one) – but I’d never been able to return the honour until now (I may need to make it two blog posts by this gent, though, considering how patient he was with my wandering words). He has also kindly supplied a Bio, which is included at the end of this post, so I’ll leave those particular details to him.
20 ways to use Pear Deck to engage students - Ditch That Textbook Instead of doing the traditional lecture, engage students actively with Pear Deck. Ask questions. Students answer. Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: 10 of The Best Tools for Creating Digital Quizzes For those of you who haven't seen it yet, here is a collection of some good web tools to help you create digital quizzes. You can use them to design interactive quizzes, questionnaire, forms, polls and many more. The tools are easy and simple to use and no software installation is required. Check them out and share with us your feedback. Links of the tools are under the visual.
Moodle Whether you’re fresh out of school or a seasoned commander of an eLearning design team, you need to make sure you have design habits. In fact, one of the worst traps you can fall into as a designer is allowing consistency to turn into complacency, which is more likely for an experienced professional. To combat this, all of us have to practice looking for inspiration in new places and drawing from the other creative types, trends, and events around us. You also need to look back at your own projects. Do you hate what you did a year ago?