Informative Assessments a Must for Common Core!

As national standards are fully integrated into class curricula, regular on-going informative assessments will become a necessary component of every lesson.  With such monitoring on the part of the teacher, students (especially ELLs) receive steady feedback on their progress in working through the activities.  When the teacher sees a student struggling, s/he can step in immediately to offer support/further explanations/additional examples, etc. to make the content more accessible.

Now, here are some additional tools to make checks-for-understanding even more engaging for all:)  In this clip, the instructor goes beyond the traditional tools such as using whiteboards, identifying strugglers by walking around the room and looking for students having problems, asking for show of hands, etc.  One is free and the other is $20.00.  Both are easy to use!  INFORMATIVE ASSESSMENTS (though Google Forms are listed, I didn't include them since they are a bit more complicated to use than the other two sites mentioned and listed below).

SOCRATIVE ASSESSMENT TOOL (FREE)  Watch the demo here.  "Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets." (from site).  It is easy to use and students can respond via cell phones, laptops, iPads, tablets, etc.  Teachers receive quick responses and, in the process, no student is signaled out as not knowing the correct answer.  This opens up the floor to discuss why certain answers were picked and why they were wrong/right.  Since no one knows who picked what, it becomes a risk-free discussion for all.

TESTMOZ  ($20 a year) is similar to Socrative.  Teachers generate quick multiple choice questions for students to answer.  Teachers can monitor how well their lessons went by having students use any device of their own choosing to take the mini-assessments.  Quickly, the teacher sees what questions students had difficulties with and what ones were not a problem.  Such rapid feedback helps a teacher keep a "finger on the pulse" of the class with ease:)

Denise

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