Digital Formative Assessments

For those of us still teaching online, here are some quick and easy ideas to formatively assess our students’ learning.

Universal Response Cards - Have students use hand signals like thumbs up/down. Try having students hold up a certain number of fingers. Or have students hold up red/green paper for yes/no or true/false questions. Another great idea is to create help, repeat, or question mark cards for students. These are great to help students who don’t or can’t write in the chat.

Peardeck Slides - Peardeck is a great extension for PowerPoints and Google Slides. They have so many options to check for understanding ranging from written response, multiple choice, draggable matching, drawing, numbers, and adding links to any website. This has been my preferred formative assessment during distance learning which I will continue to use when I go back into the classroom in the near future.

Polls - Polls are great to ask during class and even better when students can see the results. This can help foster class discussions. Polls can also be used like multiple choice questions. If most students are getting something wrong, it means that more learning and discussions need to take place. Then give the same question again after reteaching and the results should change.

Waterfall Chats - Waterfall chats are when you ask students to write a response in the chat, but not post it until you say waterfall. Once you say the magic word, all of the responses spill onto the screen and then you can give students time to read each other’s responses. The students love this one. It breaks up the monotony of the day if you use it sparingly.

Whiteboards - Paper and handwriting can be hard to see on screen especially when the students are in such small squares. A work around for this is to have students write on hand held whiteboards which are so much easier to see on screen because they are flat and easily filmed.