Category: Open Educational Resources

As our next installment of Back-to-School Digital Resources most teachers should know about, here are some assessment tools that “pass the test”. (Get it? Test…Assessment Applications? Hellooooo…errrr, hmmm.)

Plickers (https://www.plickers.com/)
video tutorial

Let’s start with the funkiest one that I have grown to really like, Plickers. Here’s how it goes: You go to Plickers and create your free teacher account and set up your class of students. You print off a card for each of your students that they can hold up in response to questions that you pose to them. Like maybe you ask, “Why did England increase the number of British troops sent to the American colonies following the French and Indian War?”

• a. To help keep the colonists from streaming into the Ohio River valley.
• b. To address the escalating aggression growing between local Native American tribes and frontiersmen.
• c. To better enforce the growing levels of taxation thrust upon the colonists to help pay for the war.
• d. All of the above.

Depending on the student, they rotate the card to present the a, b, c, or d on the top of their card and hold it up as such to where you can see it. But actually, you don’t need to see it, your scanner/camera on your Samsung or iPhone or iPad or Tablet that you wand around the room “sees” it and records their responses and attributes each response directly to the student who generated it. The students scores are instantly entered into your Plickers roster for you to show on the board as response trends, and later to use for grading. Seriously, it works. Seriously, its free. Watch the video if you don’t believe me.

 

Kahoot (https://create.kahoot.it)
video tutorial

Kind of like the Plickers app but all the students will need a device of some kind to get online and participate. They can use their school supplied tablets or computers or their own smart phones for that matter.

You create a free account, set up your students and build out your quizzes or use other teachers’ quizzes that are shared and searchable on the system. A “game-pin” code is generated and you send your students to kahoot.it and they enter the game pin code to start their quiz. Questions can have time limits as assigned by the teacher, and all response data is recorded for each of the participating students and made available to the instructor for grading. Pretty straight forward and works. Here is a teacher-made video tutorial on how she uses Kahoot.

 

Socrative (http://socrative.com)
video tutorials

This system is a bit more robust than Kahoot. Again, you create your free teacher account and set up your student list in the system. You can then direct students to quizzes you created or adopted from other teacher-users. Unlike Kahoot, you can elect to have the questions in your quizzes time-based or just let the students conduct at their own pace. Another fun feature is the space race mode in which it shows real-time, visual results of students answering questions correctly.

A student answering correctly in this mode, makes their rocket move across the screen much the same as the carnival game where you spray water causing your race horse to advance across the race-course. All resulting performance data is gathered and provided to the instructor and can be viewed within Socrative or downloaded as a spreadsheet for integration into your local grading software. Good, free, cool features. Here are the videos.

At work, I often engage with various educators and educational leaders on a number of ed. tech related projects. Away from work however, I have a small but pesky group of teachers who I relate to more as friends than as colleagues or control group members or use case study subjects.

Not to say I don’t ask them to help me out on occasion in those roles, I do…but with them, I can at least have a beer afterwards and finish the conversation with, “See you Sunday at Kim’s house for the season kickoff party.” In turn, these folks often ask me, off the clock, if I’ve seen anything worth sharing. Despite how well I know some of them, they always seem leery and cautious in asking. Its understandable, they’ve been abused by over-zealous technology coordinators and over-ambitious ed. tech marketeers these past few years. They are weary of hearing about the latest and greatest, but will on occasion afford me some access to their curiosity in the hopes that I too don’t abuse it.

They’ve become numb I guess due to all of the marketing and hyperbolized promises that surrounds some online tool that gets touted as the newest CCSS aligned, portfolio-based, authentic assessment engine but ends up essentially being a web-based version of PowerPoint with questions.

Ultimately, they know that in a given month of work I see LOTS of stuff and test LOTS of claims. They also know that I am very pragmatic if not a downright jerk in how I view most classroom software and applications. Some of my opinions have not garnered favor with many a well-funded start-up trying their damnedest to get their color of Koolaid stained upon the lips of teachers and students abroad.

However, when I do see an occasional good tool, I’m happy to share. I thought maybe I’d try posting them over the next week or so for anyone interested. Here are a few I’ve found to “not-suck” for my Back to School colleagues out there. On this post, I will focus on tools that let you search for stuff and make things out of them.

Edpuzzle (https://edpuzzle.com)

• Find videos by topic
• Crop videos
• Add notes (text or audio)
• Embed questions into video

Its not a puzzle actually. It is a simple way to put in a search term like Photosynthesis or Ratios or American Revolution and find any number of online videos on the topic. It cross-references free, legitimate video providers like National Geographic, TED, Khan, YouTube, TeacherTube, etc…AND THEN let’s you modify the video with easy cropping to get just the clip you want, and embed notes or audio to the video or even questions directly into the clip. If you want you can add students to your account and create classes and then “assign” the video to your students via email and an access code. When students go in and watch video and answer questions, you see where they are at, what they’ve watched, and any answers they’ve submitted. All free. Very easy to set up and use.

OpenEd (https://www.opened.io)

• Search for online resources
• Big list of resource partners
• Filter by standards, topics
• Add your own information and create playlists

One, big search tool for online instructional resources. Like many platforms of this ilk, youcan search by a list of topics (Math, English, History, etc.) or by Common Core Standards or even by SBAC or PARCC. If you are a teacher, you should know what those last two are, if not, look it up. You can filter for types of resources you want to see like Assessments, Games, Lessons, Activities, Videos, Questions, etc…and then if you want, add them into a “playlist” or even build them into a course. I’ve found that this site has a really credible list of resource partners that have their materials integrated into this one source. So you should be able to find something of value and use in the classroom almost every time.

Blendspace (https://www.blendspace.com)

 

• Search for resources or media
• Simple search by keyword across many sources
• Assemble into mosaic and embed quizzes

Yes, I did make fun of this company some months ago, but that was just due to their name change and the form mail they used to announce it. But, I did like it even back then. It is simple, no CCSS aligned searches, no topic directory, just put in a term you want to search for and find stuff online from Google, YouTube, OpenED (mentioned above), etc…because those engines are integrated into this tool. Once you find items you merely drag and drop them into your canvas and it creates a quilt-like mosaic of your items or a more uniform grid or list (you set it how you want it). You can then pop in the occasional quiz or additional information as separate squares into that pattern and then set up your class of students and have them access and complete as assigned.

So there ya go. Take it or leave it, I have no vested interest in any of these…although, full disclosure, I was excited to see Learning Registry cited as one of the sources delivering materials into the OpenED platform. (Our office has been working on that metadata-structure to be used precisely in this way to help enrich resource queries and returns for teachers via search tools, so yay.) This picture was based on a search in OpenED for Tectonics.