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Technology Enhanced Formative Assessment with Socrative

@JoeTaylorDHS

Full disclosure - some of this content is a repeat of a blog post I wrote in 2014. I thought it was worth revisiting.

Technology Enhanced Formative Assessment is a topic that is much bigger than this relatively short blog post. However, virtually every successful 1:1 teacher I've worked with says the same thing. The ability to use the technology to weave formative assessment into the classroom frequently and relatively seamlessly helps lead to increased student achievement.

Scholars Ian Beatty and William Gerace (2009) believe so strongly in the research behind technology-enhanced formative assessment that they built their entire pedagogy on it (click here for the full article). They wrote that the classroom should not only be student-based, but also assessment based, and that formative assessment should be used to:

1. Motivate and focus student learning with question-driven instruction.
2. Develop students’ understanding and fluency with conversational discourse.
3. Inform and adjust teaching and learning decisions.
4. Help students develop metacognitive skills (see full citation below).

There are actually lots of different tech tools to help you embed formative assessment into your classroom, but one of my favorites is called Socrative. Socrative is a free, online, classroom response system that can help you accomplish the goals outlined by Beatty and Gerace above. While you can use Socrative for asynchronous work at home (like Google Forms), or embed it within a presentation that you are making in class (like Pear Deck), I like to use it as a stand-alone tool so that an entire lesson is centered around questions and responses. 

I loved to use Socrative in a conference session I used to lead on the "Fair Use" exception to the Copyright law in the US. If you just yawned, you weren't alone. Rather than droning on about the nuances of the law, I created some fairly simple, but open to interpretation, real-life dilemmas faced by schools on a regular basis and used them to drive discussion. Here's an example:

Of course, the answer to the question is, it depends on the scenario. But it led to some great discussions both in and between our groups, and was more interesting than listening to me doing my impression of the history teacher in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

To get started, go to Socrative.com and create your free account, you have several options for interacting with your students:

You can create a quiz in advance, and lead your class through it as graphical displays of responses appear on the screen, or you can put the students in groups and have them work at their own pace. You can also create questions on the spot or use the "Space Race" (students square off against one another in teams) to add a competitive gaming element to the classroom. At the end of the activity, you can get a report of how each student did on the quiz.

Here's a really short intro video (Socrative in 90 Seconds):

But for a deeper dive, here is a detailed video from Socrative:

*And if you are interested, my go-to expert on Copyright and Fair Use is Renee Hobbs and the Media Education Lab. If the topic interests you, please explore The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education.

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Reference:
Beatty, I. D., & Gerace, W. J. (2009). Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-Based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology. Journal Of Science Education And Technology, 18(2), 146-162.