Great Apps for Assessment

With Chromebooks and iPads becoming more commonplace in the classroom, teachers are often looking for ways they can use the technology to assess their students. Below are a few recommendations.

Socrative: Use Socrative to give a multiple choice or true/false test. One of the great things about Socrative is that you can view your students progress as they take the test. Students can instantly get their results upon completion of the test. Upon giving the test, the teacher also has the option to let the students go through the test at their own pace or it can be teacher directed, going through each question one by one with the students. Test result reports can be printed or saved to your Google Drive. Socrative also has a student app for phones and tablets that makes it even easier to take the assessment.

Nearpod: The fantastic interactive presentation app, Nearpod, has a quiz element to it. Embed a quiz at the end of a presentation where the students have just reviewed the information. Nearpod makes it possible to add reference material to each question, such as a website, a picture, or a video. For example, include a map in a question and ask the students the relevance of the map. Include a drawing slide and ask the students to draw a flag or trade route. For math, ask them to solve an equation. Include an open-ended slide where the students address an essay question.

At the end of the assessment, Nearpod provides a detailed summary of how each student performed on each question type, whether it’s an open-ended question, a drawing question (which could be used for math to solve equations or draw maps), or multiple choice.

Google Forms with Flubaroo: Google forms is a great way to give students a formal assessment. But the power of Google Forms is amplified with the use of the add-on, Flubaroo. If you haven’t used Flubaroo, you owe yourself a try, it’s easy to use. Simply link your Google Form assessment to a Google Sheet. Install the Flubaroo add-on, and you’re ready to go! Take your assessment and set your answers as the answer key, so when Flubaroo grades the tests, it will grade them against your key. Once the test is graded, Flubaroo shines with the data it presents. If a majority of students got a question wrong, Flubaroo will identify that question by color coding it. And, students who scored low on the assessment will be color-coded as well on the spreadsheet — pretty cool. You can view a report showing the grade distribution as well. And lastly, the teacher can email a copy of the grade report to the student, identifying which questions the student did well on and which ones they didn’t.

Educreations: Educreations is a handy whiteboard app where students can record themselves explaining a concept. So, how can it be used for assessment you ask? Well, Educreations shines in the math classroom by asking students to explain how to solve math problems. Why not use it for assessment? Give your students problems to solve, then, ask them to work each problem out on a separate page in Educreations. When they’re done, they can copy the link of the assessment and paste it into their classrooms learning management systems such as Google Classroom, Edmodo, or Showbie for their instructor to view.