If you’re like me, there are so many tasks pressing for time in my calendar that I tend to feel as though I don’t spend enough time on assessment data. Really coming to understand what my students know feels like one of those things technology can help make more efficient. There are great ways to capture and collect snapshots of formative assessment using technology, which can also be a tool to enhance learning.
Working in Ogden, Utah, at the Summit for High School Psychology Education last summer, I was fortunate to work in a group with professionals who came together to discuss technological tools. Many of these tools are designed to help teachers assess student learning while others are useful in engaging students and reinforcing content. Google continues to develop free resources like Google Forms that can be used to create quizzes, surveys, and more. Canvas, a learning management system designed to deliver content and assessment, is the platform used to create a forthcoming APA high school Psychology course designed at the Summit in Ogden. A number of companies are developing, and marketing, quality applications available in both Android and iOS formats that can enhance learning.
Here are a few of my favorites:
One way I quickly capture formative assessment results is by using Google Forms in the Google Suite of programs. If you have a Gmail account, you can access Google Forms to create a new survey. In your survey, locate the settings gear sprocket, and with the click of a switch, your survey can become a self-scoring quiz that exports the results into a spreadsheet. To better sort the results, I start the survey quiz with separate questions for students’ last name, first name, and class period. This allows me to organize results by class period and last name, which matches my gradebook. Here is a sample Google Forms quiz. You can review the results as a summary, by questions, and by individual students. Focusing on the questions students are struggling with is easily available right there on one screen. Another Google feature is Google Slides, which I use as an interactive, daily journal. Each week, I can share a template of a slide presentation based on my lesson plans. After students makes a copy for themselves, they are able to share it with me and each other. In the presentation, I feature space for students to interact with content, respond to prompts such as class openers (bellringers), comprehension checks, and exit questions. Because they are shared with me, I can review student responses, which can be in the form a typed response, drawing, meme, or even a GIF, and I can see where my students are with understanding content. Using this in conjunction with Google Classroom and exit tickets, I encourage students to think of this an opportunity for self-evaluation. Here is a sample from my classroom for a week during the unit on Consciousness. Students have been trained that their responses are in blue, which makes it easy for me to quickly assess their responses.
Another fantastic tool to look for will be the upcoming Summit deliverable of the Canvas Course. This course should be available in late spring or early fall of 2018. The technology working group worked throughout the week to develop a useful catalog of resources aligned to APA’s national standards, quiz questions released from publicly accessible AP exams, and links to a variety of supplemental websites and information for each unit. Along with the quiz questions already included by the working group, Canvas features the ability to integrate test banks produced by textbook publishers. You can easily incorporate these test banks to create online exams, which are instantly graded in Canvas. Also included in the Summit Canvas course are links to Kahoot reviews. This game is as fun as the name sounds. (Take a look at the Kahoot for the Learning Unit.) Students link their devices to the website that presents content as a gameshow. This allows them to compete against each other while having fun reviewing the content. Teachers can create their own question banks or use quizzes other teachers have shared publicly. The Kahoot quiz links in the APA Summit course are publicly available with a Kahoot login and my students are always excited to get out their phones and study…actually study! Kahoot will even produce a spreadsheet with students’ results, providing another snapshot of formative assessment.
Finally, as we work to incorporate technology in engaging ways, I like to tell my students there’s a free app for that. Two apps that I use, and recommend to students, during the Biological Bases of Behavior unit, are the 3DBrain by DNA Learning (available in Google Play and iTunes app stores) and the Brain Tutor that is part of the Brain Voyager product family.Both apps utilize technology already available to most students and provides them with a resource particularly useful in learning the regions and parts of the brain. Both apps also provide valuable additional information from case studies, descriptions, associations, and disorders. Other useful apps I like to share in the Sensation and Perception unit include color blindness simulators that use the phone’s camera to simulate various aspects of vision and color blindness. Consider either Colorblind Vision or ColorBlindness SimulateCorrect.
Using technology to assess and engage students helps provide meaningful connections to content and to students’ progress. These resources also give me better access to assessment data and help me get a better look at what my students know and what they may be struggling to understand. As technology’s role in the classroom continues to expand, be sure to check back as more Summit deliverables become available throughout 2018.
