Formative Assessment and Instructional Tools
Flipgrid is a free tool that educators can use to have their students record and respond with videos. Educators can create assignments, discussion questions, and other tasks and students can record their video response. Classmates and the teacher can view the responses, creating a collaborative community. This is a great way to give and receive feedback, collaborate, and formatively assess students’ understanding. The website has lots of great ideas and information about how to use this tool.
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Ideas on ways to use Flipgrid:
https://www.edutopia.org/article/9-new-ways-use-flipgrid-classroom
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Padlet is an online board for notecards. Educators can create a padlet, and students post their thoughts on the board; classmates can also comment on others’ posts. This can be used for a virtual Gallery Walk, formative assessment, and project brainstorming.
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Insert Learning is a Google Chrome Extension that allows teachers to scaffold learning as their students engage in independent research and inquiry.
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Google Keep is a tool for project management, collaboration, and note-taking. Teachers can use this tool to see how students are using feedback and to scaffold instruction. Teams can use Google Keep to share resources, set up to do lists, and comment on project work. Read about lots of ways to use Google Keep during a project here (you will need to set up a free account with pblworks to access the article).
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Teachers can create activities and announcements for their students. Students can upload their work, complete assignments, and respond to teacher questions. Teachers can give feedback to students either in writing or by voice recording.
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Parlay is a tool that can be used to facilitate rich class discussions, either synchronously or asynchronously. Teachers can post discussion prompts, give feedback to students, and analyze discussion data. Students can respond to the teacher and each other.
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Teachers can design lessons and presentations using various media in real-time or for students to view on their own timeline. Students' responses to assignments can be used in formative assessment.
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Kaizena is a tool for giving feedback to students. This can be in the form of a voice recording or text; this can be incorportated in Google docs as well. Teachers can leave audio and text minilessons to embed in comments, and use automated rubrics provided on the site.
Peer Feedback
This is a free, on-line platform built for facilitating peer feedback. Students download their work and then are randomly assigned a classmates’ work to give feedback anonymously. Teachers can upload the assignment and evaluation criteria/rubric for students to use.
(see description in "Formative Assessment")
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(see description in "Formative Assessment")
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Give your students an authentic audience for their writing. Students can post their work and get (and also give) feedback from (and to) their peers.
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This provides another authentic audience for student work. Students can post blog posts and receive feedback from classmates and students around the world. Teachers maintain control of how the information is shared to ensure privacy.
Collaboration/Project Management
This is a great tool for project management, and it also supports collaboration. Teams of students can create boards, lists, and cards to keep track of assignments and due dates, assign tasks to teammates, create to-do lists, communicate with each other, and upload documents.
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Google Keep is a tool for project management, collaboration, and note-taking. Teachers can use this tool to see how students are using feedback and to scaffold instruction. Teams can use Google Keep to share resources, set up to do lists, and comment on project work. Read about lots of ways to use Google Keep during a project here (you will need to set up a free account with pblworks to access the article).
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Many schools are already using the Google suite of tools. Teams of students can share documents to collaborate, and can also add comments to their work, providing feedback to each other.
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This is a way for teams to keep track of their research and resources. Collaborators can bookmark, annotate, collect, organize, and share their sources here.
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Other Tools
iNaturalist was developed by the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic and is a database of observations in nature. Users can take photos of their observations in the natural world, and then receive suggestions to aid in identifying what they see. They can also assist others by joining projects in their area. Some photos might also be added to collections created by scientist, thereby helping them to study biodiversity in the world.
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Why are we learning this? Connect your students in virtual meetings with industry professionals, watch videos made by those professionals, take industry tours, and help your students research career possibilities on this site.
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A podcast creation tool.
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