Stuff this week - Making a Teacher's Life Easy: Digital Assessment Tools
Two weeks ago I introduced a concept which has been shown to increase the time a teacher has available on the classroom to work directly with the students, flipped learning. This week I want to mention another time saving use of technology.
Teachers regularly conduct quick assessments of student progress during a block of teaching a topic. Typically this will be a short exam such as a spelling test. After the test is completed the teacher has to spend time marking the twenty or so papers which takes time. This method enables the teacher to know where every student is at with the subject material but the time taken up is large. An alternative is a short quiz where the teacher asks individual students for their response. This doesn't take much time but doesn't capture every child’s level of understanding. What is needed is something which every child answers but doesn't need to be marked individually by the teacher.
As it turns out there are a multitude of software options that do just this. They can be used as conversation starters, competitions or plain individual tests. All of the software I mention below is free for school or small class use.
 If all the teacher has access to is a phone or tablet they could use Plickers. Each student is given a piece of paper with a unique shape on it. Depending on which way up the paper is held the students can answer A,B,C or D. The teacher scans across the room with their phone, the app recognises each student's answer and records it for immediate display or later analysis.
 Once all students have a device then the teacher could use Kahoot. Kahoot is best known for its quiz show style mode where the fastest to give the correct answer gets a higher score than other correct students. This adds an element of fun ( gamification) to the assessment. It also has an untimed quiz mode. In all cases data can be downloaded for later review. Some teachers prefer Socrative which is similar.
Gosoapbox is best known for its discussion mode. Students are presented with the multiple choice answers and after they choose they are then shown a graph of how many students chose each answer. This is great for checking opinions on a topic which can then lead into why the students have that view. It also has a quiz mode as well.
If data gathering is the goal then Google Forms would likely be the perfect choice or for spelling tests the website Spelling Stars is a good solution.
It is helpful to be across a number of these tools as they each have their strengths. Teachers just need to select the tool that saves them time and if it increases student engagement then that would be a bonus. If they were setting a multiple choice assessment anyway then why would you not use one?
Has your school trialed any of these tools? Was it successful? If not then please let me know why.
P.S. The are many other applications available. Just google “ kahoot alternative” and filter for the last year. | 
