Assessment for Learning 

Think of assessment as a road map for your thinking and planning.

All d.i. is based on formal and informal assessment. The Latin root of assessment is “assidere” meaning, “to sit  beside.” Assessment should be used as a coaching or nurturing tool, and not something that always comes at the end of learning.

Take short temperature reads while involving students in their learning.

What is the difference in formative and summative assessment?

Formative assessment is:

•Assessment FOR Learning: it is a process

• Checks learning to decide what to do next

• Is designed to assist teachers and students

• Is used in conversation about learning

• Is specific and uses descriptive feedback in words (instead of numbers, scores, and grades)

• Is usually focused on improvement, compared with the student’s “previous best,” and progress toward a standard

•Needs to involve the student—the person most able to improve the learning

Examples

Summative assessment is:

•Assessment OF Learning

Backchannels 

VoiceThread  upload a document or image and students and teachers can comment. You can respond by text, video and audio

Assessment Apps 

As administrators and educators, we need to find ways to assess staff and students. If you work with special-needs students, part of the process is documenting goals that are measurable. We now have apps that can assist us with tracking students' progress. 

Three Ring is a service offering free Android and iPhone apps for digitizing and organizing student work. Using the app teachers can take a picture of a student's work and upload it to a free Three Ring account. Three Ring offers teachers a lot of organizational flexibility. You could organize artifacts by student name, class, date, or just about any other tagging system that works for you.

Performance Data Comes too Late to be Useful to the Learner

Socrative 2.0 includes a brand new design and great new features. Here is an introductory video about the new features.  It is a system that uses cell phones and or laptops (user's choice) for gathering feedback from students. You can post as many questions as you like in a variety of formats. step by step guide
Common Core Tagging with Socrative
You are be able to tag all your Socrative assessments with Common Core Standards, making student data even more clear and applicable to your teaching needs. Add sub and superscripts too!
How It Works:
When creating or editing a quiz in Socrative 2.0 (beta.socrative.com), simply click the Add Tag button to select the specific Common Core standard you are testing. It's that easy! The tags you choose will appear at the top of the quiz during creation and editing, and will also appear on your Socrative data reports.

Back-Channeling with Socrative | Socrative Garden-
Socrative has class backchannel capabilities.

One of the nice administrative aspects of Socrative is the ability to share quizzes with colleagues and import quizzes that are shared with you.  I found their massive spreadsheet of more than 1,000 shared quizzes. The spreadsheet is arranged by subject and grade level. You can find a quiz by opening the filter menu and selecting a subject. Once you have found a quiz you can import it into your Socrative account. video tutorial or Click  http://help.socrative.com/?help_center=import-a-quiz-from-excel-or-a-socrative-user for directions on that process.

Student AR is a new augmented reality application that works in Google Glass. The app allows you to simply look at a student, snap a picture, and record an observation about that student's behavior. All of your observations can be synced to your ClassCharts, ClassDojo, or Edmodo account where students and their parents can access all of your observations.

Answer Garden - Sometimes you may wish to just ask a question and let your students give their creative answer. Answer Garden allows you to do this on the web. You can show the interaction on a website, print the results, or even put the results into a Word Cloud for the class to analyze!

eduClipper iPad app brings more of the features of the eduClipper website to your iPad. Your students can now use the iPad app to create presentation portfolios. Just as you can distribute assignments to students through the eduClipper website you can now do the same with the iPad app. A new feature of the latest version of the app is the option to give your students audio and video feedback. Written feedback is still an option too.

BrightLoop a pp and website helps you capture classroom data in real time. With your phone you can track classroom moments in seconds - take notes on students, photos of student work, track student learning and IEP goals, or assess your students against the CCSS. It all comes together where each student generates a beautiful portfolio ready to share with parents or specialists. iPad/iPnone app https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brightloop/id949219829?mt=8

SMILE (Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment) turns a traditional classroom into a highly interactive learning environment by engaging students in critical reasoning and problem solving while enabling them to generate, share, and evaluate multimedia-rich inquiries. app LMS

Vizaroo  somewhat similar to Socrative and Infuse Learning. The idea behind Vizaroo is to use the web to collect instant feedback from students in your classroom. Much like Socrative and Infuse Learning students can use Vizaroo from any device that connects to the Internet. Vizaroo appears to be trying to differentiate itself from similar services in the way that it displays feedback collected from students. Student feedback can be displayed in a web format of connected ideas, a Venn diagram format, or in a simple "yes or no" two column format.

Create Common Craft Screencasts.  example implementation free screencast programs at http://ditech.yolasite.com/apps.php#screen
Tricider is a free brainstorming tool to make easy decisions with your friends or work mates.

Geddit This site allows students to use any mobile device to gauge their understanding of any given topic/lesson.  The way this works as a lesson is being given they click/tap a on bar (think bar graph increasing vertically) to show their understanding (i.e., 1 bar - not very - 4 bars - very).  On the the teacher's device they will receive instant real-time feedback and be able to see which students are doing good and which ones are struggling.  This is a great way for teachers to differentiate instruction and adjust their lessons to meet individual needs.

Plickers Plickers is a student response system that uses a teacher’s iPad, iPhone, or Android device in conjunction with a series of QR codes to create a student response system. Students are given a set of QR codes on large index cards. The codes are assigned to students. Each code card can be turned in four orientations. Each orientation provides a different answer. When the teacher is ready to collect data, he or she uses the Plickers mobile app to scan the cards to see a bar graph of responses. Teachers can create and save as many questions and responses as they like. The data collected can be viewed in a web browser or in the mobile app.

ExitTicket is a student response system that allows educators assess student performance and then differentiate instruction in real-time.  Also, being browser based, ExitTicket runs on any mobile device and has a educational student app.  Students can view their assessment scores that are aligned to Common Core Standards.  Best of all are the abundance of educational resources/videos that help educators integrate ExitTicket into the classroom. 

Handouts is a paperless student/teacher platform for tablet-centered classrooms.  With this app teachers can create handouts to distribute to students by taking a picture of a paper activity sheet or importing digital files they’ve already made.  Teachers can select which handouts they want to distribute and send them to the whole class or individual students. Once students are sent handouts they can open them on their tablet and use their finger or a stylus to complete the activity.  After they’ve finished, students can turn in their work straight to their teachers.  Teachers can grade student work from within the app and send feedback for kids to review.  With Handouts teachers can even select certain pieces of student work to put in a digital portfolio.

GoConqr app (formerly known as ExamTime) has recently been through a major site overhaul which has improved on the user interface, mobiles apps (iOS), and polished new look.  This is an excellent learning tool for education that lets users create, flashcards, mindmaps, quizzes, and more.

More iPad Apps

• ForAllRubrics Easily find or create rubrics in your web browser. Complete them by going to ForAllRubrics.com in Safari on your iPad. Safari can store and sync rubrics for use offline. You can print rubrics or save a PDF or spreadsheet. You can also have students log in to view their rubrics.
• 
  ForAllRubrics website, one click sharing of assessment results by email with students and parents and many more.
• Plickers Poll your students without the need for them to have any devices. Simply print a card for each student to hold up. Pan your iPad across the room so Plickers can scan the cards using the camera.
• Otus is a innovative new mobile learning system for the iPad.  Educators can track assignments, assess students, poll, browse the web, take attendance, and more.  It is a complete all-in-one solution for the mobile learning environment.  Educators can even "flip" a lesson for at home instructions.  Also, the simple to use split-screen allows students to take notes while working on assignments. 
• Classkick gives you the ability to watch your whole class and give huge amounts of student feedback - all from your iPad.  You can now watch all your students work, and give them individualized feedback, in real-time! Also an app here
• WeLearnedIt is the latest offering from eduClipper. WeLearnedIt offers many of the great features of eduClipper along with additional digital portfolio elements. Through the WeLearnedIt iPad app you and your students can create digital portfolios that contain files from Google Drive, Dropbox, links from the web, images and videos captured with your iPad, and whiteboard videos created within the WeLearnedIt app. Applications for Education 
  The best aspects of WeLearnedIt are found in the feedback and sharing tools. Teachers can assign grades to elements of students’ digital portfolios. Grading is not limited to assigning scores. Teachers can give written feedback on each submission. Rubrics for assignments are available through the app too. School-wide implementations (a fee-based option) of WeLearnedIt allow teachers and administrators to share assessment data. 

No Red Ink is a free site for students to help improve their writing and grammar skills.  NRI uses differentiated learning so it adapts to student's needs and focuses on the areas they need help in.  Also, NRI focuses on a student's content area interest to keep writing interesting and exciting.  Finally, teachers can use NRI for testing and assessing a student's needs as well as generate maps/reports for student/class tracking.

Chalkup provides tools to help students work and study together.  Kids can collaborate with their peers through the online platform to complete projects and correspond with one another.  Students can also pose questions when they are struggling to understand an assignment or a core concept.  Chalkup gives teachers the power to create an environment where students are not passively taking in a lecture.  They are engaged, on task and growing as learners. New feature that you’ll want to check out – rubrics that make it simple to assess and grade student projects and assignments

EDpuzzle - How about turning a video into an interactive lesson? With this free website, add audio notes and quizzes at any point to a video. click here for overview and implementation ideas

Authentic Assessment Toolbox

iPracticeMath is a site for educators or students looking to teach, learn, or reinforce their math skills.  Geared towards K-12, iPracticeMath covers a wide variety of subjects such as: Geometry, Algebra, Fractions, etc.  Also, iPM has an abundance of resources for educators/students to use such as: worksheets, problem walkthroughs, glossary, and more.  Best of all a registered educator/parent can get detailed reporting and track student progres

Quipper is an iOS/Android app for finding or creating quizzes.  This app already has a large repository of quizzes but a user can create their own as well.  A nice feature is the ability to track your progress on a quiz/subject as well as the detailed explanations around each topic

Problem Attic is a free service that allows you to quickly create practice tests and flashcards for social studies, language arts, mathematics, and science.Since then it has nearly doubled the number of practice questions that are available for teachers to use to create practice assessments and flashcards.

Assessment Generators

These generators guide you through the process of creating a variety of assessment and evaluation tools. You could use them as; criteria checklists, discussion checklists, 3 point – 4 point -5 point rating scale, matrix rubric, weighted matrix rubric, and matrix rubric with points.

Verso - A innovative site/app where educators can create Flipped Lessons that students can respond to.

ForAllRubrics! Once you set up your class list, this website allows users to import rubrics they’ve already made, or easily create new ones.  Open the site on your iPad and with a few taps you’ll have projects graded in no time.  It’s easy to access previous grades, print out data, and it’s free for teachers.

iRubric: interactive rubrics. You create your own or search and edit other rubrics in the gallery.

Rubrics for all Subjects and Tools

Rubrics for Blogging and and Multimedia Projects . In the collection you will find rubrics for assessing student blogging, student wikis, podcasts, and video projects. Beyond the rubrics for digital projects there are rubrics for activities that aren't necessarily digital in nature. For example, you can find rubrics for writing, research, and oral presentations. 

Rubrics for assessing digital projects. In the collection you will find rubrics for assessing student blogging, student wikis, podcasts, and video projects. Beyond the rubrics for digital projects there are rubrics for activities that aren't necessarily digital in nature. For example, you can find rubrics for writing, research, and oral presentations

ChallengeU is an online educational platform that allows teachers to create and share learning activities. Teachers can make content available to students anywhere at anytime, and ChallengeU is compatible on all devices and completely free. Teachers can upload different file types and student questions all in the same activity. Students can then hand in assignments in the form or videos, audio, pictures and a handful of other file types. They can even comment on the work of their peers and develop online learning communities. Teachers can track students progress and instantly let students  see comments, corrections and feedback on assignments

ForAllRubrics - This online service helps you construct rubrics of any kind, then print and save them.

Rubrics for Assessment A collection of rubrics for assessing portfolios, cooperative learning, research process/ report, PowerPoint, podcast, oral presentation, web page, blog, wiki, and other web 2.0 projects.

iRubric A rubric development, assessment, and sharing tool. iRubric supports a variety of applications in an easy-to-use package.  iRubric School-Edition empowers schools with an easy-to-use system for monitoring student learning outcomes and aligning with standards.

Specific Rubrics

• 3-5 Critical Thinking Rubric (CCSS Aligned)
• 6-12 Critical Thinking Rubric (CCSS Aligned)
• 3-5 Collaboration Rubric (CCSS Aligned)
• 6-12 Collaboration Rubric (CCSS Aligned)
• 3-5 Presentation Rubric (CCSS Aligned)
• 6-8 Presentation Rubric (CCSS Aligned)
• 9-12 Presentation Rubric (CCSS Aligned)
• K-2 Creativity & Innovation Rubric3-5 Creativity & Innovation Rubric (CCSS Aligned)
• 6-12 Creativity & Innovation Rubric (CCSS Aligned)

SWORD Peer Review Software A free web-based, peer review system that was developed to help teachers organize writing assignments in a way that uses peer review as its backbone. Overview article

Quiz Revolution - create interactive online assessments and analyze the data It is an easy way to make a multimedia quiz for your website or blog. With Quiz Revolution you can include video, audio, and image file in your quiz. Each
question in your quiz can have a different media format. There are two options for
answer format, multiple choice or open-ended response. Quizzes are easy to create and easy to embed into a website or blog. If your students register for a Quiz Revolution account before they take your quiz, you can monitor their quiz results.

QuizStar Free web based testing manager that allows educators to create a class, quizzes, administer quizzes and view results. Unique Feature: Multimedia files can be included in quizzes. There is also a unique student log in page with a tutorial.

Studiyo- 

Allows you create quizzes and customize them

Gnowledge is a free site designed for creating and sharing tests, done through an innovative, easy-to-use interface. Anyone familiar with test creation sites or PowerGrade will feel right at home. Also, there is a definite social networking aspect that is ideal for 21st Century learning through collaboration and the sharing of tests and answers.hands-on tutorials and a great FAQ page.

Fifty Sneakers A service for cataloging content that you quiz your students on. Your catalog of quiz materials can include a variety of text questions, images, and videos. Fifty Sneakers makes it easy to create quizzes and other assessment tools from your catalog. When it comes time to create a quiz, open your Fifty Sneakers content then select the questions and materials that you want to include in your quiz then print out your quiz. Fifty Sneakers provides detailed tutorials to get you started building your content library and quizzes. 

Understoodit web app for quickly gauging your students' understanding of information that you have shared with them. Just open your account and open the simple poll of "understand" or "confused." Students can vote using any internet-connected device. Students can vote whenever you have the poll open. They can vote multiple times too. So if they are confused at the beginning of class, but understand ten minutes later they can change their votes.

Online Quiz Creator: Play or Make a Quiz for Free! With this online quiz creator it's easy to make a quiz, exam or assessment in less than five minutes.

Game Show Soundboard app to create simple game shows with sound effects

The Answer Pad allows you to set up an electronic answer sheet to a test you’ve already created. Students can then “fill in” their multiple-choice answers by using the TAPit app or The Answer Pad website. Ability to assign a Common Core Standard to each question. Also, w/ their latest feature, Go Interactive, it turns an iPad or mobile device into a Student Response "clicker" system.  This takes the whole "clicker" system that most schools use w/ an interactive whiteboard to a whole new level.  Now teachers can engage students and assess their learning in real-time w/ no prep work.

19 Pencils - A site for creating quizzes and websites with student tracking.

Yaca Paca - An interesting site that is free for students and teachers.  This is ideal for online assessments and allows teachers to create quizzes, surveys, and more.

ThatMathQuiz iPad app is a simple website with more power than meets the eye. At first glance, it’s a menu of mostly math skills for students to practice. Good start. Overview click here.

GoToQuiz.com
It's a very simple site for creating a quiz that generates a unique URL for others to take.

Seterra This is a website that provides a wide range of geography quizzes. These quizzes can be downloaded and they cover everything from country identification to identifying physical geographic features like mountains, seas, and rivers.

Blubbr quiz creation service. Using Blubbr you can create interactive quizzes that are based on YouTube clips. The structure of the quizzes has a viewer watch a short clip then answer a multiple choice question about the clip. Viewers know right away if they chose the correct answer or not. To create a quiz on Blubbr start by entering a topic for your quiz. After entering your topic enter a search for a video about that topic. Blubbr will generate a list of videos that you can select from to use in your quiz. When you find a video that works for you, trim the clip to a length that you like then write out your question and answer choices. Click here to try a short Blubbr quiz about the human heart.

CyQuiz  This is a site for creating educational games that can be used in quizzes.  Everything is done via the browser so can work on any type of a computer and even works on mobile devices too.  Also, these quizzes can pictures and sound and are very user friendly.

Poll Daddy- 

Create polls and have the option to embed them on your Web site or blog

Pinnion is a tool that you can use to survey your audience through your website, blog, or through mobile devices.Pinnion you can create multiple surveys using multiple question formats. Your survey can be distributed to a specific audience through Pinnion's channel service (you create the channels) or you can cast a wide net and gather responses from anyone who visits your website or blog. Pinnion offers Android and iPhone apps for gathering feedback.

11 Polling and Survey Sites Reviewed

QuizSlides is a new (beta) site for creating quizzes  The way this works is that QS turns slides from PP into quizzes that can be answered once or more then once by students.

Testmoz is a test generator that sports 4 question types, automatic grading, a really simple interface and detailed reports.Testmoz is free, and does not require you (or your students) to register.

GoClass is a free iPad application for creating short lessons and delivering them to your students. The lessons can include annotated images, free hand sketches, text, and video. GoClass gives teachers tools for creating class rosters that they can use to keep track of which students are using the lessons when. Teachers also have the option to ask questions and poll their students. After the students' response have been gathered teachers can project those responses without showing individual student's names.

Quibblo Using Quibblo you will be able to :

• Create a quiz, poll or survey on any topic that you choose.

• Browse through an ever expanding world of content and take a quizzes, polls and surveys created by other members.

• Review quiz, poll, and survey results to see how different segments of people responded.

• Rate and comment on quizzes, polls and surveys.

• Add quizzes, polls, and surveys to your website or social network profile.

• Display quiz, poll, and survey results on your website or social network profile.

• Find and connect with other people like you or different people.
  

Powerpoint Assessment Games

ClassTools Website

Easy Test Maker Website This tool is a free, online test generator that allows you to create: multiple choice, fil in the blank, matching, short answer & true and false questions.

Paper Rater -  Free site that checks for grammar, spelling, proof reading, and plagiarism. Valuable for students and teacher

Bernajean Porter’s “Digitales” Interactive Scoring> Guides for Digit...

Paul Allison's "Be a Blogger" Website

Intel Assessment Rubrics Go to Try it and then watch the animation for an overview

Entri Entri is a free collaborative tool for writing and sharing documents. Say you are writing an article for your blog and you want to share with your readers before you publish it to get feedback and allow changes.

Easy Test Maker Online test generator that allows you to create: multiple choice, fil in the blank, matching, short answer & true and false questions.

Class Dojo An instant and visual way to keep a record of class points. You can award them for whatever you wish, but the site has a good selection of ideas as default. There are also negative points for things like late homework and calling out in call, all of which can be changed to suit your needs. Many unique features over similar sites. The best feature is that teachers can manage points through a mobile browser on a smart phone which acts like a remote control in class. Free at the moment.

Student Web 2.0 Collaboration Rubric a rubric to measure the depth and breadth of collaboration and communication by students when they are using a collaborative tool

Three Alternatives to Clicker Response Systems

Using clicker systems is one of many ways that technology can be used to gather anonymous feedback from students in a classroom. One of the problems associated with those systems is the cost of acquiring them. Here are three alternatives to purchasing clicker systems for your school while still gathering anonymous feedback from students.

Soap Box  Enables teachers to gather instant feedback from students through their cell phones, tablets, or laptops. Soap Box offers nine useful functions for teachers and students. The video  offers an overview of all of the features. The "confusion barometer" allows students to state their status as either "I get it" or "I'm confused." Two other features are the "smart filter" and the "profanity filter." The smart filter searches for similar questions in the backchannel to avoid duplicates. The profanity filter blocks inappropriate language from being posted in the backchannel.

Socrative is a system that uses cell phones and or laptops (user's choice) for gathering feedback from students. You can post as many questions as you like in a variety of formats. The video offers a nice overview of the Socrative system.

Poll Everywhere is a service that allows you to collect responses from an audience via text messaging. The free plan for K-12 educators provides selection of features and quantity of responses that is adequate for almost any classroom. One of the neat ways to display feedback gathered through Poll Everywhere is in word clouds. The word cloud feature integrates with Wordle, Tagxedo, and Tagul. Video Overview
Poll Everywhere's mobile site allows presenters to create polls and administer polls from their iPads, iPhones, Android tablets, and Android phones. To use the mobile site just go to pollev.com/present in your mobile browser and start creating new polls.

Quizlet’s free iPad app makes all of their flashcards available to students wherever they take their iPads. Through the Quizlet iPad app students can access their own sets of flashcards or search for those created and shared by others. Through the app students can access their flashcards used even when they don’t have an internet connection. Quizlet flashcards can include audio elements in eighteen languages.

Infuse Learning is a free student response system that works with any Internet-connected device including iPads and Android tablets. Infuse Learning allows teachers to push questions, prompts, and quizzes out to students' devices in private virtual classrooms. In an Infuse Learning room a teacher can give students a wide variety of formats in which to response to a question or prompt. Students can reply to prompts and questions in standard multiple choice, true/false, and short answer formats. But Infuse Learning also offers an option for students to reply by creating drawings or diagrams on their iPads, Android tablets, or on their laptops. Infuse Learning offers a couple of helpful accessibility options including support for multiple languages.

The Answer Pad is a free service for teachers that allows teachers to create electronic answer sheet for any test they create on any subject online.  Students then take these tests via a free app on the iPad, TAPit.  Teachers can access their scores, reports, and more all online.

Student Response Systems That Work On All Devices

• Socrative is the standard to compare all new student response systems. Socrative uses cell phones and or laptops (user's choice) for gathering feedback from students. You can post as many questions as you like in a variety of formats. One of the more fun question formats is the "space race" format in which students can work individually or in teams to answer questions as quickly as possible. The video below offers a nice overview of the Socrative system.
• Quiz Socket is a tool developed for the purpose of enabling teachers to quickly gather feedback from students. Quiz Socket enables students to respond to questions through their cell phones, tablets, and laptops. Here's how Quiz Socket works. Teachers visit the Quiz Socket website and click "create quiz." A quiz code is assigned to the teacher. The teacher then gives that quiz code to students to enter on QuizSocket.com. Teachers then deliver multiple choice questions to students either verbally or by posting them on a whiteboard. The teacher controls the pace of the quiz by simply clicking "next question" to move the quiz along.
• Kahoot is a service for delivering online quizzes and surveys to your students. The premise of Kahoot is similar to that of Socrative and Infuse Learning. On Kahoot you create a quiz or survey that your students respond to through any device that has a web browser. Your Kahoot questions can include pictures and videos. As the teacher you can control the pace of the Kahoot quiz or survey by imposing a time limit for each question. As students answer questions they are awarded points for correct answers and the timeliness of their answers. A scoreboard is displayed on the teacher's screen. Students do not need to have a Kahoot account in order to participate in your activities. To participate they simply have to visit Kahoot.it then enter the PIN code that you give to them to join the activity.
• 
  
• Verso is a free service that offers a nice way to deliver flipped lessons to students and gather feedback from them. As a teacher you can create Verso classrooms that your students join. In your classroom you can post videos, links, and files from your Google Drive account. Include response prompts with each item that you post. You can specify how many responses you want to gather from each student. When students sign into your Verso classroom they will see every new item you've posted for them. If you've posted a video it will play within the Verso environment. Students can track their completion progress in their account dashboards.
• Wiffiti is a service that allows you to receive text messages and display them on a screen. Get feedback from students and display that feedback in a manner similar to sticking Post It notes. You can collect feedback from text messages or from Tweets on the web. You can also collect images that your audience sends to your Wiffiti board. You could also use Wiffiti to have your students vote on a question similar voting option in Socrative

Nanoogo - ideal for students for creating digital portfolios of projects and different items of what they've learned in the classroom.  What makes Nanoogo so great is that it is free and there is an educational portal which allows teachers to monitor and track all student activity.

Student Evaluation - Self reflection often is insightful  for all stakeholders. This simple form cuts to the chase for differentiated instruction.

Mathchat – easy to create math problems, students can draw responses, help each other, ask friends for help all through a live communication function within the app 

Kids Teach Tunes - (gr. K-8) Putting knowledge to music. Besides the suggested tunes try having students create raps.

More Resources for formative assessment not all tech based. 

Examples of Formative Assessment