#ililc5 Rachel Smith @lancslassrach Fabulous Formative Assessment Tools

As always, Rachel delivered an excellent session despite a stressful start with tech issues. As she pointed out at the start of the session, tech shortens the feedback loop, thereby making the assessment more relevant and able to inform your teaching.
She talked about one of my firm favs, Nearpod. A massive advantage to using Nearpod is that you can drag in powerpoints that have already been made then add slides to make the content interactive. There are different interactive options including drawing and surveys. When you set an interactive task, as teacher you get immediate feedback, as you can see who is answering and how long they are taking to answer.

Rachel then mentioned the Socrative teacher app, giving a quick demo of how it works. Again, I am familiar with this app and like it. If you set up a dept account, you can get the pupils to all log on to the same account and create quizzes for you which you then test using the Socrative Student app. 

Infuse learning is a very similar website although Joe Dale pointed out that it may have a short shelf life left. It can be pupil paced and looks worth a look. AnswerGarden allows answers of 20 or 40  characters with the answers displayed as a Wordle. You can share the link on Twitter or embed the code as two of the options. I've set one up for Form 3 on leisure so I'll share the results. 

A massive favourite in our iPad classroom is Kahoot. Teachers use getkahoot.com to create or copy existing quizzes, students get a class code for kahoot.it to play the game. It's fastest finger first to get the most points and pupils get feedback on what position they are in after each question. With my pupils, those who are on the board at the end of the quiz get a sticker for their star chart. 

We also use Plickers which is an excellent and immediate feedback tool. You set the question, have the class set up on plickers.com and then scan the class who hold up their Plicker (which looks a little bit like a jigsaw piece) It is unique to them and gives you immediate feedback re pupil knowledge and/or self evaluation. 

Rachel finished the session with the website Educanon, You can insert text into video. An advantage is that whilst the teacher needs an account, pupils do not. You can then make it into a QR code and kids can scan it or embed into Edmodo. Rachel's tips include: sets of questions are called bulbs and you can crop out sections of the video you don't want. You go to bulbs to find your video, select and when it gets to point where you want to ask a question, you tap to add the question. Pupils select no email then go to the video.

Whilst I had heard of some of these tools and sites, others were new to me. It is always good to revisit sites and it is excellent to get some new ones to have a play with. Rachel is filled with enthusiasm and we all left inspired to have a go too.