I recently read an article through the @nbea twitter account about formative assessment ideas. The article likened formative assessment to a chef who is constantly tasting the food they make as they make it. Constantly checking to see if everything is just right, and if it is not, making minor (or major) adjustments to correct the problems. From this perspective, summative assessment is likened to the chef serving the food to a customer for their final approval.
As a husband and father of 2 who does most of the cooking at home, I related to this example. I found myself asking how I could, like a chef, constantly check to see if everything is just right in my classroom.
I have used Socrative before in my classroom, but never Infuse Learning. My goal is to use these tools to better track my students learning during daily lessons. I currently use a variety of formative assessment tools, like exit quizzes through Canvas, practice assignments, and classroom discussions. However, I am specifically looking for ways to track student learning during the initial teaching of a new concept, during the students initial knowledge acquisition stages. I think these two tech tools can help me accomplish this and will help my students learn better.
My initial thoughts on the use of these tools for this purpose are very promising. I like Socrative and the simplicity that is built in. I especially like that I can have the students type a short answer question and then narrow the results down and rebroadcast the smaller set as a multiple choice question for the class. It gives me the ability to both initially engage all students as thinkers, and then focus their thought and team discussions (collaboration) in a more focused direction.
While I do like Socrative's possibilities in the short answer and multiple choice catagories, I am thoroughly impressed with Infuse Learning's option of a sort and order question. When used in the right way, this allows students to problem solve and think through a variety of questions and then apply their answer to some data set that must be sorted. For my class today, it was identifying the smallest unit of computer measurement and sorting through the largest unit of measurement. When the students had a chance to answer the question themselves, I was able to see a very interesting thing in the data provided to me by the tool in the very moment it was happening. In all of my classes, there was a 50/50 split on what the students thought was a correct sort. This immediate data, let me have the students collaborate in groups to try and narrow in on the correct answer. In all classes, the teams were able to discuss, teach, and work through misunderstandings and problems to come up with the correct results. I could not have been happier. Even in the class that did not come to a perfect outcome, it gave us the opportunity to work through the problem as a class to identify why the correct sort was correct (below).
At the end of both days of class using these tools, I walked away feeling good as an educator and empowerment for my students. It is a good day in class when I can lead my students to solve the problem and get to the right answer without ever actually having to tell them "the answer". In my mind, this is formative assessment. Knowing that my students know the concept, without ever actually having to ask them if they do.
