The use of assessment technology in my teaching career has been sporadic at best. As a teacher of mainly English, I do not have many tests, and if I do, they are paper and pencil.
When we were in the throws of Covid, I did have some quizzes on the reading that we had been doing in class, so I leveraged Google Forms as my assessment tool. As I have noted previously, our school uses Hapara (Workspace) as our online platform and it leverages the use of the Google Suite of software. So, the choice of Google Form was easy, and some previous experience with the software to elicit feedback from students gave me the familiarity.
As highlighted by Neumann et al. (2019), Forms allows for easy administration of the information, as well as quickly allows for data to be available to the teacher.
A concern that I had was the lack of control. I was unable to control the environment from which students operated, as we were in remote learning and students could complete the quiz at any time. I had considered students completing the quiz during our synchronous sessions, but due to the disparity in student progress, this was not feasible. The assessment data was used then to inform student knowledge and allowed me to help fill in the gaps for their major writing projects.
Another tool that I used frequently were Smartboard Response Clickers.
I was able to take my previous PowerPoint presentations and export them to Smart Notebook software. In Smart’s software teachers were able to place questions and then students could use the ‘clickers’ to respond.
Setting up each presentation required 20-25 minutes to create and the addition of the questions did not take much more time.
At the end of the presentation you were then able to go through the data and review it with your class.
If you were just looking to gather some data and not track student progress, then the process for handing out these ‘clickers’ was simple. As the clickers that we had only had basic numerical responses, it was a challenge to have student names attached to their data. A system that I devised, as I wanted to use some of the data for summative marks, was to have each student have a preassigned ‘clicker’ that they used.
The goal in using these assessment tools was to quickly gain information that I could use to provide feedback to my students.
I still have the Smart Response clickers in my classroom, but I have not used them more than once or twice as the use of google forms has supplanted it. There is less set up in using forms, but the lack of integration into presentations does change the way that I had taught in the past. Now, there may be a method to integrate the two, but I have not made the effort to find a solution to this.
Grocholski - An educational Journey 