Triventy: Formative Assessment and Review Quizzes

http://www.triventy.com/assets/logo-c10b50c4ab89b6c125d03ffff9fe1fce.png

Most teachers who do some kind of online review or formative assessment with students have heard of and possibly even used Kahoot.  It's a great tool for allowing for easy and fun review and gauging how well students understand the material or information.  However, using the same tool all the time can lessen the fun, so today I'm bringing up another great review tool that is easy to use and very similar to Kahoot called Triventy.

Triventy is an online tool that allows you to create easy to use formative assessments or reviews that you can do with students in class.  The biggest difference that Triventy has from other online review tools is that it allows for collaborative creation of games and reviews.  This can be great if you work in a team setting (middle school I'm thinking of you!) or if your department wants to work together on something that you all can use.  You could also have groups of students create reviews and work together that way.

A few other features I like about this tool is the ability to add hints to the questions so students who are struggling can get some extra help without being obvious, and the ability to add extra facts or feedback after each question.  You can also adjust some of the quiz settings itself so that it won't display student names with results as you are playing.

One of the biggest downsides of this tool for me is that right now it does not keep the results after the game is done, so you have to take a screenshot of the final results to keep those.  It's not a huge inconvenience, but I like having the results in a spreadsheet so I can look back later and see what topics I might need to revisit or where certain students had issues.  I hope this is a feature that we will see in the future, but for now that's the only real downside for me with this tool.

For more information on how to use Triventy and how to create quizzes, check out the video below from FreeTech4Teachers.com .  FreeTech4Teachers is a great blog and a great resource for all kinds of free tech tools!

Some Changes to Google Forms

Many teachers have discovered the benefits that Google Forms can bring to the classroom. It can be used for quizzes, exit tickets, and rubric assessments. Many of you may already use Google Forms, but may have noticed some changes to the forms since school started this fall.

The new Google Forms looks a lot like the Classroom Interface. Both the question and response page are available from the form, yet you can still get a separate response sheet. Let's look at the anatomy of the new form.

From the picture, you can see that the form looks a little different than it did in the past, but it functions the same way.

If you don't like the new form, click on the running guy picture in the lower left and it will revert to the old form version (in case you want to flee from this change!).

Besides looking a bit different, Google has renamed a few question types.

• SHORT ANSWER used to be called TEXT
• DROPDOWN used to be called CHOOSE FROM A LIST
• LINEAR SCALE used to be called SCALE
• MULTIPLE CHOICE GRID used to be called GRID

The response tab allows you to turn on and off accepting responses. Clicking the Green box also allows you to create a spreadsheet rather than just viewing responses in the Form.

Whether you are a veteran of using Google Forms or a newcomer, once you get used to the changes, you will enjoy these new features.

Check out this video tutorial for more information:

Another Rubric Tool - DocAppender

http://cloudlab.newvisions.org/_/rsrc/1445871114197/add-ons/docappender/docAppender_lg.png

Welcome back!  I hope you all had a restful and fun holiday! One of my earlier posts this fall discussed the tool Orange Slice, which is an add-on for Google that allows you to easily insert and use rubrics with Google docs.  Today I wanted to look at another rubric tool called DocAppender.  This tool is similar to Orange Slice in that it is a Google add-on, but this tool allows you use a Google Form that stamps a rubric into your document.

To use the tool, you basically create a Google Form, add the DocAppender add-on to the form (which you only need to do once).  Then you can choose a folder where the student documents are stored, and if you use Google Classroom, this works seamlessly to include your Classroom folders.  You then choose rubric items to use for that particular assignment, choose the score, and submit. The rubric is then stamped onto the assignment you are grading.  It can also work really well for peer editing.  See the links below for some tutorials and more information.

DocAppender Site
Youtube Tutorial on Using DocAppender

Step by step instructions and examples for DocAppender