Quizlet Live - Take Your Quizlet Reviews to the Next Level

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Quizlet has recently added a new feature to their site called Quizlet Live.  It takes existing review sets that teachers have already made and turns them into a fun, interactive review game that can be played in class.  It is free with any teacher's Quizlet account (students do not have the option).  I was fortunate enough to get to see this in action in a Foreign Language class this week, and I was struck by how engaged the students were in reviewing simple vocabulary.

One of the key differences between Quizlet Live and some of the other class activity review sites like Kahoot, is that students play in teams.  There is no option for a student to not engage, because the team cannot move forward without every person contributing.  In other ways it works the same, because students go out to the Quizlet Live site, enter the game code and their name, and can then participate.  Teachers can remove students if needed and Quizlet will them group them into teams.

In the Quizlet Live game, the answers for the questions are divided among the team, but each person can only see their own answers.  Then, as each question appears on the student's screen, if they have the answer, they click it.  If they do not have the answer, they have to wait until whichever teammate who has the answer clicks it. In this way, if someone is not contributing, the whole team is stuck.  Additionally, if a wrong answer is given, the team goes back to the beginning and has to start over.

Each team will receive the same question set, but not necessarily in the same order.  While Quizlet Live recommends putting teammates next to each other, the teacher I observed did not have the teams together.  Her reasoning was that if they sit next to each other, they will just look at each other's screens and push answers for each other.  However, students were still allowed to call out answers to their teammates to try and help them, and the students seemed to enjoy it more that way.

Overall, this is a great new addition to an already great resource.  It is engaging and fun, and provides a great option for doing class review. Any Quizlet review set that is already made and has at least 12 questions can be used.  If you already use Quizlet, or even if you don't, you should check out the links below and give Quizlet Live a try!

Video About How to Play Quizlet Live
Info about Quizlet Live
View a Demo
Help Center - How to Use Quizlet Live

Online Activities and More Formative Assessment with Wizer

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Last week I had a colleague tell me about a web tool called Wizer that has a lot of potential for providing ways for students to practice skills and complete assignments outside of class, and also providing great data for formative assessment.  While there are a number of formative assessment tools out there, this one goes beyond just classroom formative assessment and can be used to assign homework, reviews, and practice to students outside of class, while providing immediate feedback to students and data for teachers.  The tool is incredibly easy to sign up for and use, and there are a number of options for creating worksheets with more on the way.

While the tool has many standard question types such as open ended questions, multiple choice, and fill in the blanks, it also has some interesting options like filling in answers on an image and matching, as well as options for including text, images, tables, video, links, and embedding from outside sources.  This makes it much easier to create a multiple part question like providing students with a video and then asking questions about it, or giving information in a table and then asking questions about the table.  Additional features that are in the works include collaboration, drawing, and sorting/ordering.

Creating an assessment or worksheet and adding questions is incredible easy, and there are a number of options for changing the theme and look of the worksheet.  Assigning to students is even easier, because the tool has Google Classroom integration, so with just a few clicks you can add it to your Google Classroom page as an announcement or assignment. Students then just click the link, log into their own Google accounts, and complete the worksheet.  You can choose to have the automated questions automatically provide feedback and then grade the other questions later.  Student responses can be immediately viewed when they complete the worksheet and feedback provided.  If you don't use Google Classroom, you can share the assignment with students by sending them a link or using a PIN code that they would enter into the website.

Overall, this tool is incredibly easy to use and can take formative assessment beyond the classroom walls and a class activity.  It can be used in a variety of ways and instead of sending students home with paper worksheets and assignments to complete, they can complete questions online for easier feedback and tracking of student data.  Check out the video below for an overview on how to use the tool and get started!

More Formative Assessment Options - Quizalize

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We probably all know that the formative assessment web tool options are numerous, so I almost feel bad adding another option into the mix, but that's what I'm going to do with week with Quizalize.  However, I tend to stick to my go-to choices for in-class activities, such as Socrative, Kahoot, or Go Formative.  One thing these tools have in common that makes them so useful is the aspect of allowing students to play the review in class and compete against each other. I also tend to like options like Quizlet for individual student review.   However, in-class formative assessment tools generally don't allow for any use outside of the class activity, and options like Quizlet are difficult for the teacher to track and review student progress unless you have an upgraded teacher account. This is the niche that Quizalize is attempting to fill.  It works very similar to reviews like Socrative and Kahoot, but allows students to log in and complete the reviews whenever they would like.

As a teacher, you can create questions on a review, assign it to a class, provide students with the class code, and then have students log into the class and complete the reviews.  You can see student progress and results, and students can get immediate feedback.  This could be a great option for allowing students to do individual reviews and not always having to complete them as a class activity.  The tool itself is also very easy to use on both the teacher and student sides.

When creating an account, if you have a Google Education account and Google Classroom classes, if you sign up with that Google account it will actually import all of your classes from Google Classroom into Quizalize.

When creating quizzes, the options are fairly basic.  Multiple choice or true false questions with one right answer.  You do have the option of adding images, and there is a neat feature for Math Mode, which allows for equations to be included in the questions and answers. Also, you can provide immediate feedback for the student about the question.  As with most of these tools, you can also use public quizzes from other users and multiple settings that can be adjusted when assigning the quiz.

Overall, Quizalize is more than just another formative assessment tool.  It can be a valuable review resource for both students and teachers, and provides some additional features not included in many review tools.  Watch the video below from the Free Tech for Teachers blog to learn more.

Triventy: Formative Assessment and Review Quizzes

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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!

Formative Assessment in the Classroom and Tools to Help

                 

Formative assessment has become a focus in the classroom here at my high school and there are a number of technology tools that can help with that.  I did a couple of blog posts last year on different formative assessment tools and the ones I like to use, so this post is simply a review of a couple of really helpful ones, with a link to a chart comparing a variety of options.

The formative assessment online tool I find myself recommending more and more is called Formative.  Not a super original name, but it tells you what it does.  I think what I like most about this tool is the variety of question options it has, both quick responses where you don't have to pre-load the questions, and quizzes and assignments you can create ahead of time.  Additionally, you can assign formative assessments to students, so it doesn't always necessarily have to be done live in class with students.  Students can answer a variety of ways, including by writing or drawing on the screen, or by taking a picture of their work and uploading it as an answer.  I find this one very helpful for math and science where it may not be feasible to have the students actually work through the answer on the computer as easily.  With formative, they can still work through the problem on paper, but then take a picture of it and turn that in so the teacher can still see their work.  Overall, formative has shown itself to be a well-rounded formative assessment tool, so if you don't like to use a lot of different tools in your classroom, this is a good one to try. And for more information, check out this old post from last year about Formative.

Kahoot is another formative assessment tool that I really like, simply because it is easy to use and fun.  I have used this with a few library lessons during summer school and the students are always engaged and have fun with it.  In an nutshell, Kahoot takes formative assessment and turns it into a game.  The premise is still the same (find out what your students know), but the set-up of Kahoot, the multiple choice answer format, and the "rankings" it gives after each questions turn it into a fun game for the students. This is a tool that can make a formative assessment more fun if not overused and timed right with the appropriate lesson. For more details about Kahoot, check out this old post from last year.

Plickers is a formative assessment tool that I have not personally used but learned about from a teacher during summer school who used it in her class.  It is basically the old version of holding up your notecards with an A, B, C, or D on them, but using technology.  The benefit of the Plickers is that instead of notecards with letters it uses QR codes, which are then held in one of 4 different directions by the students, which helps cut down on those students that are only holding up the letter A because they see everyone else doing it.  The students hold up their cards and then the teacher scans the room with the app open on a device (computer, iPad, tablet, phone, etc) and the app feeds the student answers into a format the teacher can see and review.  Like Kahoot, it is something a little neat and different, and while it is fairly limited in the types of questions you can ask, it is fun and engaging for students and can make formative assessments a little more interesting.

Well that's plenty of formative assessment information to get you going, but if you are still looking for different formative assessment tools to use in the classroom, check out this comparison chart from Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers.  It is a helpful way to compare different formative assessment tools and find the one that's right for you!

Formative - A Great Assessment Tool

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There are a number of formative assessment tools available for classroom use, some of which I have blogged about before.  One new tool I learned about this week thanks to my colleagues up at North is an online tool called Formative.  Like the name suggests, this tool is designed for formative assessment in the classroom.  However, it goes beyond the classroom and lets teachers create assignments that students can complete in or outside of class.  This is a great feature that most existing formative assessment tools do not have.

Formative has a number of very useful features.  Teacher can create classes and then students can either join those classes, or join an assignment without having to log in.  But with Google quick log in, it's easy to have students log in and have accounts.

First, you can start by creating an assignment from scratch or by uploading an existing PDF, Word Document, or Google Doc.  If you start from scratch, you can add different types of questions, including multiple choice, true/false, text, or drawing.  The drawing response also lets students upload photos, so if a problem is too complex to draw on a computer, they could potentially work it out on paper, take a picture of it, and add it that way.  The possibilities are endless!  If you start by uploading an existing document, you can then add those same types of questions to the document, making it interactive for students.  However, you do not have to prepare assignments and questions ahead of time - you can also do quick questions live in class and receive data back as well.

Once an assignment is made, the teacher can then assign it to one or multiple classes, and then give students a quick code or link to join the assignment, or have them access it through the class dashboard.  Teacher can choose to do assignments together in class, or have students complete them outside of class.  Sharing assignments with other teachers is easy too!

Finally, once assignments are under way, teachers can see student work real-time and receive data in a variety of ways to track how students are understanding the class materials.  Teachers can choose when students can view the feedback as well.

Overall, this tool surpasses most of the other formative assessment tools out there with it's variety of options and choices.  While there are still new features being added, this tool has a lot of potential to provide an easy way to track student progress and gather data about student learning.  Check out the links below for tutorials and more information!

GoFormative Site

About GoFormative.com (1:11)

See more about how to use this tool here:

Students Don't Have to Log In to UseFormative (1:14)

How to Create Classes with Go Formative(2:21)

See Real-Time Student Drawings withFormative (2:22)

Grading with Formative (3:23)

Transforma document into a formative assessment (4:11) 
All Formative Tutorial Videos

Office Mix - Turn Your Presentations into Interactive Student Lessons

Well, I missed my post last week while I was at the NDATL Conference, but it was totally worth it because I picked up some great tech ideas for some of my teachers to try in their classrooms. In particular, I was very impressed with Microsoft's Office Mix.  Office Mix is an add-on for powerpoint that lets you take an existing powerpoint (or create a new one) and turn it into an interactive lesson for your students.  You can record directly on your powerpoint, do screen recordings or screenshots, insert outside audio or video, insert quiz questions or other app enhancements, and then upload the whole thing so that students can access and interact with the lesson on any device.  But wait, it gets even better... if your students have Office 365 accounts like ours do, you can track their access to your lesson and receive information on how they interact with the lesson and how they do on the quiz questions.

To access Office Mix, you can go to https://mix.office.com/ and download the add-on.  Or, if you're in my district, you can access the add-on through the software center and add it yourself.  Once you have the add-on, you'll see a tab in powerpoint that says Mix.  When working in a presentation or creating a new one, you can add the different Mix elements from that tab.  When you're done with your mix, you can upload it directly to Mix where it will be stored and your students can access it.

One of the things I really like about this tool is that once the Mix is created and uploaded, students can access it from any device.  Additionally, while the teacher has to go through the work of creating the Mix and adding all the different elements, once it's done, you can just supply the link to the student and that is all they need to access it.  You can also set different access levels, such as limiting it to your own organization, requiring a link and a sign in, allowing anyone with the link to view, or making it completely public.  However, if you want to make use of the analytic tools and reports, you'll want to require a login or keep it within your organization.

Overall, I found Office Mix to be an intriguing tool that has a lot of potential for flipped classrooms or for changing the way we use existing powerpoints in the classroom.  For more information, check out the Office Mix for Teachers Resources website.  For some sample educational mixes and an introductory video about Office Mix, click here.  Happy Mixing!

Are You in Kahoot!?

Formative assessment is a big topic around here and a focus this year, so this blog post will focus on another formative assessment tool called Kahoot.  Kahoot is a student response system that allows teachers to create pre-made quizzes, discussions, and surveys, which can then be done interactively in class.  The site adds a game-like quality to the formative assessment, making more fun and interactive for students.

Teachers can create their own Kahoots (quizzes, discussions, or surveys) or use ones other teachers have created and made public.  After completing the activity teachers can receive a summary report that provides information about each student and the class as a whole, including a breakdown by question on how the students did during the activity.  This can help teachers evaluate later individual students who may need more attention, or topics that they may need to reteach.

See the videos below for more information on using Kahoot!

Introduction to Kahoot for Classroom Assessments
Get Kahoot  - link to site for teachers to sign up
Kahootit! - Link for students to participate in an assessment