Page 79 - Resources and Support for the Online Educator

CHAPTER 11 • Leveraging Technology for Teacher Efficiency and Effectivenes

I saw similar practices in many classrooms (and I have been guilty of the same, so
I’m not pointing fingers). The teacher had the best intentions. What she didn’t have
was a good understanding of how to use a fun game as a formative assessment. For
one thing, student data was automatically collected by Kahoot! throughout the
game, so the teacher could have seen where individual students had made errors.
Second, she could have stood in the back of the room with her computer and seen
exactly how students were getting their answers. Finally, she could have analyzed
the data and planned an activity for the following day where she met with students
having the most difficulty for re-teaching, and engaged the remaining students in
games or activities where the students with the most solid understanding acted as
reviewers for students with a few holes in their knowledge.

Almost anything can become a formative assessment. Exit slips where students
identify what they learned and where they still had questions are formative assess-
ments. Roaming the room and noting on a list the strategies students are trying
for solving a math problem is a formative assessment. Scanning a room with a cell
phone’s Plickers app to gauge how students responded to a multiple choice ques-
tion about content being taught (plickers.com) is an assessment. Giving an online
quiz, conducting a survey, and asking students to fill out self-assessment rubrics
are all good formative assessment tools, provided the information is analyzed and
instruction changes to differentiate for those who do and don’t understand.

The best example I observed in several years of being in classrooms was a middle-
school math teacher who assessed her students formatively about every two
minutes. The students didn’t know they were being assessed because she used so
many strategies. Her teaching adjusted constantly. Sometimes she rearranged part-
ners; sometimes she required lunchtime study hall; sometimes she rewrote the next
day’s problems. She often asked students to indicate how comfortable they would
be teaching the concept to a classmate. The teacher had trained all students on her
expectations for tutors, because any student might become a tutor at any time. The
students confident about that day’s math concept became 10-minute tutors. Peers
could choose any tutor and work in that small group for 10 minutes. The teacher
took notes constantly. Because she had been using formative assessments for many
years, the teacher’s practices were second nature. She’s the exception. But we can
learn from her example.

Technology offers many tools that can be used to assess students’ understanding—
and often those tools automatically store the data for teachers’ convenience.

268 Integrating Technology in the Classroom

Integrating Technology in the Classroom: Tools to Meet the Needs of Every Student 79