Technology Hacks, Especially for Littles: Use Audio, Video, and Pictures

A few teachers have mentioned a stumbling block for using powerful formative assessment tools are that their learners need more supports. Lots of written directions won't help emerging readers. Having to type a lot won't work for students still learning keyboarding. 

But oftentimes, these roadblocks can be overcome! The benefits of using the technology are great, and with a few tricks or hacks, teachers can speed up the process and reap those benefits. Here are a few, designed especially for younger learners or other students who might need more supports:

Issue: You want to use an online tool to assess students, but students don't have the reading (or perhaps typing) skills needed to complete the online assessment/activity quickly.

Idea #1: Flip

Flip, formerly known as Flipgrid, is a free tool that allows students to respond to prompts--either written or video--with audio or video. It also allows for students to give responses to the recordings of their peers, if the teacher chooses, and for teachers to give recorded feedback. Flip includes quiz tools as well as many other ways to engage students in learning. 

Flip has Immersive Reader built in, which can read text out loud, and Flip has enabled more supports to help younger learners record their voice and/or video response. According to these PreK-2 tips, teachers can use QR codes to support student sign-in to topics. If this sounds like something you are interested in, TLI would love to help you realize your vision!

Idea #2: Google Forms

Google Forms are one example of a powerful tool for formative assessment. Google forms allows you to insert video, which is great for sharing audio and visuals. It also allows you to use pictures as answer choices, which is especially powerful if you just need students to give a prompt a Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down. You can also use the MOTE chrome extension to easily add audio to quickly record yourself OR to have students record themselves giving a longer answer.

Idea #3: Mote

Note that you can also use MOTE to allow students to record themselves in other Google documents, like slides, as in this example of a See-Think-Wonder activity (click to access the demonstration and slide template). Although GPS currently only has the free version of MOTE, which limits recording, the tool has a lot of possibilities for quick and easy audio recording.

BONUS: You can use the MOTE extension to create guided reading experiences (which might be faster and easier than creating audio with media creation tools like Screencastify). The video below shows how this audio tool can be used in 4 different ways to support learners, with the focus on upper elementary or secondary learners who might need more supports:

 

What tools do you use to make assessment more accessible and flexible for your learners? What challenges do you foresee having to work through that others might have solutions for? Let us know in the comments.

Save Time Scoring to Spend Time on What Matters

Midterms at GHS have inspired several questions about ways to save time on scoring assessments. While there are limits to what multiple choice can assess well, questions that are carefully designed and target specific objectives can assess higher order thinking and provide teachers with the ability to provide students with fast feedback. 

Megan Faherty of Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers blog/podcast puts this well: "If you don't have time to grade it, students don't have time to learn from it."

There is so much research about the impact of feedback on student performance. But for fast feedback from these types of assessments to be meaningful, teachers need to plan for students to use it. 

Depending on the tools teachers use, there are many options for helping students review and use their feedback from assessments that involve limited choices.

A few ideas, such as those from "Getting Students to Engage with Feedback," 

• "Make a connection between the expectations of an assignment and feedback. When I set an expectation, I explain how I will give feedback and the way students should apply the feedback to their work."
• "Create opportunities for students to interact with feedback during class sessions."
• Students can work with peers who had similar challenges to determine what skill or concept was involved in the question troubled them, and think about what knowledge or strategies might help them in the future.
• Teachers might also create specific plans for students to review questions or problems, recognize their strengths, and utilize resources to help address areas of struggle. Simply having students review incorrect responses and answering questions like, "Why is the correct answer better than the other options? Why did you think the answer choice selected was right? Can you find evidence for why it is wrong?" helps improve engagement with this work. 

This aligns with research that shows that "Short, low-stakes tests also help teachers gauge how well students understand the material and what they need to reteach. This is effective when tests are formative—that is, designed for immediate feedback so that students and teachers can see students’ areas of strength and weakness and address areas for growth."

Asking students to take the time to review not only saves you time, but then also leads to better results, especially if students know they can retest or they earn back credit for showing that they know the material via these test reflections.

Tools to Speed Up Grading (and Feedback)

In several posts on this blog, we talk about the value of fast feedback for student learning. So how do you do this in a way that is safe (remember CT's student data privacy rules) and speedy?

Enter tools like Google Forms and Zipgrade, which offer fast results and teacher-friendly data reporting.

Zipgrade has the advantage of working with paper. This is great if you have a longer multiple choice assessment (up to 100 questions) or secure test that wouldn't work well as a Google Form quiz OR if you don't have access to student devices. Essentially, you can print a premade scantron-style sheet to use for multiple choice, true/false, and matching questions--or create a custom one for gridded-numeric entry questions--and students will fill in their responses. The teacher then uses a smartphone or tablet with the app to scan the answer key and score the papers. A set of 20 sheets can be scored in under 2 minutes!

To see what this process looks like, watch the first few minutes of this video; this YouTuber also walks through the getting started process, which is regularly updated for iPhone and Android users on the Zipgrade website.

Zipgrade also quickly provides an overview of student scores, item analysis, and allows you to print individualized reports for students:

Class Overview Reporting

Item Analysis

Google Forms quizzes have the advantages of being completely free (Zipgrade has a limit of 100 scans/month in a free account), and offering a wider variety of question-types, embedded media, and seamless integration with Google Classroom.

The above video shows just some of the options for creating Google Forms quizzes and viewing data that will help you plan instruction and focus areas for students. 

What makes this an huge time-saver is the ability to work with Google Classroom and Infinite Campus gradebook sync to quickly pull the scores from the Form to the Classroom, and from the Classroom Gradebook to the IC Gradebook. This two minute process not only gives students quick feedback in Classroom (as you can enable them to view their quiz results), but also saves you time entering data.

Google Forms Automatic Save Update: What if I don't want it?

Google Forms was recently updated with a feature that many teachers have wanted... allowing students to save their work in progress! What if they need to finish a survey later? A self-assessment? This AUTOMATICALLY allows them to save (provided they are signed into their Google account). 

But Alice Keeler, edtech and "teaching math with technology" expert, recently shared this situation:

But what if you do NOT want to have this feature? You do not want students to be able to pull up the answers they put into their Google Form first period to show a student in 2nd period?

 Check out the full blog post for how to turn this off on a form and how to do a quick audit and fix any "old forms" you want to disable this feature for.

Google Forms for Parents (New School Year Ideas)

I have followed Kasey Bell's Shake Up Learning blog for years, and just started listening to her podcast. One of her latest, 30 Ways to Use Google Forms in the Classroom, reminded me of just how many ways there are to use this great Google tool. I particularly liked two for the start of the year:

#10 Parent Information. Once I went paperless for my high school syllabus, I began asking for electronic acknowledgement from parents. Normally parents return a sheet at the end of a big packet of paper with a signature, but students were always losing these AND I seldom got them all back. By emailing all parents the form with the syllabus link embedded on top, I saved paper and had more parents engaged with the syllabi than before because they could access it from their phone. Click here to view (and here to make a copy of) my template if it helps!

A great idea from the podcast for those working on GRADE LEVEL TEAMS was to send one form with a parent questionnaire for the group and share the spreadsheet, saving parents from having to fill out the same information multiple times.

#23 The Parent/Guardian Communication Log. While I used a spreadsheet for this, not everyone is proficient in Google sheets, making this a great "access anywhere" alternative. I also like that it can automatically collect the date, remind me to include parent information (i.e. was it Mom or Dad!), and lots of open space to summarize our communication. I also like that in the results, I can print each "individual response" sheet to share with administration if needed for an office referral.

There are so many great ideas... let us know which one is your favorite in the comments!😁

-Jessica Gillespie