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.

Five Ways to Turn Up the Power of Google Sheets

Google Sheets can be much more than a simple spreadsheet application. Turn up the power of Sheets with these five add-on's!

Flubaroo

Attched to a Google Sheet, Flubaroo is a powerful grading tool. Not only can it grade assignments that in a Google Sheet, but if you have the student email, you can return their grades to their shared folder.  Using one of my favorite application in Pear Deck?  You can send your Pear Deck results to a Google Sheet and use Flubaroo to grade them.

Doctopus

Doctopus is a great way to distribute classroom assignments in a paperless classroom. Students simply look in their "Shared With Me" folder for their assignment. The thing that's great about Doctopus (of which Google Classroom recently added) is that it provides a way to differntiate assignments among the students in your class. Want student "A" to do all of the questions on the worksheet while student "B" should only do half of them, it's easy to send out separate assignments. Once the due date for the assignment has arrived, you can "ingest" the assignment for grading and return the digital copy.

Goobric

Goobric takes that rubric you have on a Google Sheet and attaches it to student work for easy grading. It works hand in hand with Doctopus. Once you've got the student work in Doctopus, attach the Goobric, grade and return--it's really easy to do and makes grading simple.

Rostersync

Rostersync is heaven sent for those that are typing rosters into a spreadsheat to use for different applications such as grading apps. It works in conjunction with Google Classroom in that it pulls your roster from Classroom or vice versa sending a roster from your spreadsheet to Google Classroom. It works great when you want to set up a class with Doctopus.

Autocrat 

Autocrat is a document merge app that takes information you have on a spreadsheet and moves it to a Google Doc or PDF. For example, you've asked the students to sign in using Google Forms when attending an after school study session because want to give the students a certificate of participation. The Google Form is connected to a Google Sheet for easy reference. You can take the information on the Google Sheet and create certificates of participation using Autocrat. It's also great for use at staff meetings. The staff signs in through a Google Form that's tied to a Google Sheet. Use Autocrat to create a certificate of attendance.

Pear Deck: Interactive Goodness

Pear Deck is interactive goodness that every teacher with access to technology should have in their teaching arsenal.

I was introduced to Pear Deck recently at a Google Summit. Those of you not familiar with what a Google Summit is all about, it's essentially a geek fest for educators. It showcases various ways to expand your teaching through the use of Google for Education services or other online tools that help promote student learning. One of the sessions I attended was on an online service called Pear Deck.

I like to think of Pear Deck as PowerPoint on steroids. Pear Deck is online presentation software where you don't really need a projector or screen to share your Pear Deck with your students. You see, Pear Deck is interactive. Students don't simply sit there and stare at a presentation jotting down a few notes. No, quit the contrary, students are busy interacting with the deck, answering essay questions, choosing multiple choice answers, drawing, and labeling things in the presentation.

Gone are the days where a teacher tries to make the material interesting by spending hours creating flashy presentations, hoping to keep the students attention while relaying the course content. Instead, students are using devices such as Chromebooks, a PC, a tablet, or even a phone to participate in the presentation. Also, participation is no longer dominated by those few students that are constantly raising their hands while the timid few are afraid to answer a question. And when you do call on those that rarely raise their hands, the "I don't know" answer won't work.

Pear Deck demands participation by reviewing student answers anonymously. That's right! When reviewing student answers, it's done anonymously, erasing the fear that some students have by giving the wrong answer. Students want to participate if, for no other reason, they want to see their answer projected on the screen for all to see. Oftentimes, when I was using Pear Deck, I could hear students say "that's my drawing" or "that's my answer!"

If you so choose, you can project the deck on a screen, reviewing student answers with each question. Students particularly get a kick out of the questions that ask them to draw something. Showing their work on the screen along with their classmates will usually elicit a giggle not only from the students, but from the teacher as well.

Pear Deck also excels in that it works nicely with Google Drive, so all of your student decks are saved where you have easy access to them. At the end of the session, you can send each student a copy of their deck, called takeaways. A takeaway is not only a copy of the deck, but a copy of the answers the student provided. It serves as a great way to provide a study guide for an upcoming quiz. Speaking of quiz, you can take Pear Deck to the next level by coupling it with Flubaroo. Use Pear Deck as a quiz and then export student answers to a Google Sheet, and have Flubaroo correct it. Students will not only have taken a teacher led quiz, but have their results right away.

Pear Deck has many possibilities. It is indeed interactive goodness for the classroom.