SRS Showdown

          In our Technology of Educ. 209 class, we did student response systems where we used a jigsaw method in the beginning and a week later, we presented our favorite or most effective online resource tool that could be implemented into a classroom. While watching our groups show their online tool, I realized the variety of ways students could be assessed. Not only will it assess the students, but the teacher could create assessments any form they want from simple quiz to a creative one like drawing, watching videos, or simple short answers and multiple choice. With these formative assessments, they are very beneficial for the students and teachers. By assessing students, the teacher will figure out where the student lies in knowing the content of a subject. Teachers will see what the student understand and doesn't understand then help the student from there on what is needed to be worked. Out of all the various tools I have seen in the SRS showdown, there are a few that stood out to me while watching my classmates engage us in their tools.

          The first tool I enjoyed was the one my group worked on which is called Formative, https://goformative.com/. Something I enjoyed about Formative was that you could connect your Google Classroom to it or make a classroom on it and give the students a code to log in. When creating an assessment, Formative allows you to choose what the assessment is whether it is a quiz, benchmark, essay, and even just extra practice. When making the questions, this tool gives options on what type of question to ask. These options are multiple choice, show your work which is drawing, essay, true and false, and short answer. One aspect that I appreciate about this tool would be being able to see the students take the assessments live. Since Formative gives this option, it allows a teacher to comment on what the student is working on while taking the assessment and show which question they got right or wrong. A final aspect about Formative is it allows a teacher to track students work as a whole or individually. This is an important aspects with assessing students. Being able to track a students work is crucial to further guide and help the student's needs. Yet, the only weakness Formative has is that a teacher with a free account can track a student's progress on assignments up to two weeks which can be an issue when trying to see the students' progress throughout the year.

          The other two tools I thought were wonderful are called Verso, https://versolearning.com/, and Quizizz, https://quizizz.com/. Verso is an online tool to also assess students but something interesting about this tools is that with a teacher's account, it is possible to swap to a student account and vice versa. Being able to swap allows a teacher to be in someone else's class and interact in it. Verso also only assesses students with written answers. This is great since it allows the students to think about what they are writing and engage rather than multiple choice. Also, this tool allows the teacher to group students who may have similar answers to the given question and have them comment and talk with one another. The only downside to Verso is that a teacher is only able to have one class with the free account and may be time consuming to create an assessment since it give options to have a video, picture, or link with the assessment. Now Quizizz is a formative assessment that allows students to take short quizzes online that are in a way creative. Quizizz allows a teacher to import their created quizzes to Google Classroom, Edmodo, and Remind or students can put in the code to take the quiz. Quizizz give quizzes a different view to giving students a random avatar before taking the quiz. It adds an effect to how the students may view taking a quiz allowing it to be engaging. The last couple of these about this tool is that it allows the teacher to change the language of the quiz which is beneficial for the students who's first language may not be English and the second is that the teacher can send the scores to the students' parents. The only downside to this tool is that students are scored on how fast they can answer a question. This will not be the best way to see how well the student understands the material since some may take longer to answer a question than others.

          Over all, this was one of the best activities my class had been able to experience. I have gained a lot of knowledge of the variety of formative assessment tools that are out there. I can see myself using some of these tools to assess my future students and be able to engage them in other forms rather than multiple choice. Lastly, I have learned how to make creative assessments and know how to view my student's development and knowledge of concepts.