6 More Useful Formative Assessment Tools
My last article focused on 5 formative assessment tools. This article focuses on 6 more—for both formative and summative assessment.
1. Tools For Student Reflection
While, to my mind, nothing beats VoiceThread (a video and image-based reflection platform that allows voice-based discussions—no longer free), Recap is a nice reflection tool that tries to both differentiate and personalize student learning. Teachers can post assignments, create traditional discussion-board type questions, playlists of student questions, and students can reflect on questions via video (really simple to use) and assess their own work on assignments.
2. More Assessment: Rubrics! Rubrics! Rubrics!
ForAllRubrics is a free and powerful rubric maker for teachers. Teachers can upload their class roster, import rubrics into the system, use one of the many free rubrics within ForAllRubrics (linked to Common Core and Buck Institute of Education rubrics on project-based learning), or create their own rubrics, checklists or badges. The site has a powerful suite of analytic tools (which I have not used). If you use rubrics, this site is a keeper.
As a bonus, check out the Google Sheet extensions Doctopus and Goobric which distribute student rubric scores into student folders in Google Classroom.
3. Tools For Peer Assessment
Mentimeter is a nice, free, and simple to use peer assessment/polling tool. I just recently completed a 2-week workshop in Thailand where the tool was a huge hit with university instructors. Mentimeter has none of the awkwardness of other polling tools, has a clean, simple interface, allows you to create presentations and to crate multiple types of polls and quizzes (open response, like mine below) or multiple choice. The downside is the limited number of slides in the free version (Mentimeter has a more robust paid version).
4. Grading
Flubaroo is a grading application that works with Google Sheets and Forms and allows you to grade traditional right-wrong quizzes and tests. It is very similar to the Google Sheets’ rubric extension about which I wrote in May, Flubaroo requires you to import rosters of your class, creates an extra output sheet with grades, and allows you to email grades to your students.
5. Tools For Recall And Quick Assessments
Flippity is (yes) another Google Sheets extension that allows you to make flash cards, quiz shows (like my Jeopardy below for review of an online course I just finished teaching). Flippity comes with easy-to-use templates and after some initial awkwardness with URLs, allows you to publish to the web. It’s a bit retro with its flash cards and Bingo options, but simple and fun and good for assessing lower-level learning like identification, recall and comprehension.
More sleek, colorful and Kahoot-like is Quizziz. Like Kahoot, Quizziz is colorful, fast-paced and lets the teacher set up online quizzes in which students can participate if they have the join code. Quizziz comes with a library of quizzes, some academic, many not. Unlike Kahoot, where answer choices are visible only projected on a screen, in Quizziz, students can see the answer choices on their devices.
6. Tools For Other Types Of Assessment
Wizer.me is a really robust tool for making worksheets (yes, the printed ones we all did in school). Wizer comes with tons of colorful templates that teachers can use for homework and worksheets. Better still teachers can share worksheets in Wizer which you can search for by topic or subject, use or modify. Even better is that Wizer allows you to create online, more robust worksheets—with multiple choice and other assessment options.
Final Thoughts
These are just a few of the hundreds of free online assessment tools. For more thorough searching and more comprehensive and reputable review than what I’ve offered here, check out Common Sense Media’s very authoritative ratings of formative assessment tools.
In June I wrote about the audience response system, Sli.do. I was recently contacted by one of the developers of Glisser, a similar tool, who asked me to try out Glisser. While I am not able to do so yet, I am attaching the link here for those who would like to give Glisser a test drive. I would be curious to know what you think.
