Assessment Tools

Create quizzes, tests, surveys, etc. and compile your data instantly. Greatly reduce the amount of time you spend correcting paper so you can focus your energy on adjusting your instruction to what your data is telling you! Good teachers are always checking for understanding and striving for more information in regard to whether their students have learned. While just about any site that reports or gives feedback can be used as a form of assessment, I have included on this page the sites that compile data and share a report of some form with the teacher. If you are interested in how other sites might be used to check for understanding, follow my blog,
"Tech-ing the Classroom" where I discuss web 2.0 tools and how they can be used to inform instruction and increase student engagement and participation.

AWW: A Web Whiteboard

AWW is a touch web-based whiteboard. It is extremely simple - which makes it great. What you see is what you get. AWW is a browser-based application that plays nice with any modern browser (Chrome, Explorer, Firefox, etc.). AWW lets you use your desktop, tablet, laptop, or Smart phone to easily draw sketches, collaborate with others, and share. I included it here in the assessment tools because it allows access to the whiteboard for all users. Instead of presenting on your whiteboard and asking 1 student to demonstrate knowledge at a time, AWW gives you the capability to ask a class to demonstrate at once.

ClassConnect

ClassConnect allows you to run a full virtual classroom. Store and update files through ClassConnect as well as create quizzes, polls, and surveys. ClassConnect also allows you to host live lectures online with chat capabilities and generate forums for your class. Students join your "class" using a code that you assign. So, there is no need for the students to register. ClassConnect is my personal favorite for online classroom management for its ease of use.

Collaborize Classroom

Collaborize Classroom offers many of the same features as ClassConnect. However, I feel Collaborize Classroom is easier to set up and allows for more question type discussion starters. Often, it is hard to hear every student's voice on a particular topic. This leads to uncertainty of understanding for all students. Use Collaborize Classroom to pose questions online where students may think about their response, answer at will, and be heard. It is easy to set up a class in Collaborize Classroom. Once you have, post questions within the discussion forum feature. Questions can be prompts requiring students to post an answer or idea, simple yes/no, multiple choice, or, my favorite, the vote or suggest option. The vote or suggest option allows students to vote for an existing option or offer a suggestion to open-ended prompts. All discussions can be tracked and reported in very nice visual graphs and charts. Collaborize Classroom Video Overview

Edmodo

Edmodo is a virtual classroom space. Enter your class or classes and use Edmodo to connect with your class anytime or anywhere. Create quizzes, polls, assignments and control due dates. Manage grade books and groups of students. Compile data and print reports. Set up online chat rooms, load videos, photos, and text. Edmodo is like a social network for you and your students. Connect with students and other teachers from all over the world. There are thousands of ways you could use Edmodo with your class.

Gnowledge

Gnowleddge is an online test creation site. Anyone can create, share, and take tests on Gnowledge. Results are catalogued for easy reference and tests can be taken as many times as you'd like. Question order can be randomized each time. You can even practice taking tests that have been loaded by other users.

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators (Assessment & Rubrics)

Kathy Schrock has been doing great things in education for a long time. Her assessment and rubric tools are very expansive and easy to use of modify. On this resource page through her Guide for Education section on the Discovery Education site, you are able to find a rubric or assessment technique for just about anything.

Kidblog

If you've used journals or some form of logs to check for understanding, consider adopting blogging in your classroom - take the journal to the 21st Century!. The advantages to using blogs over paper/pencil are many. Namely, the instant updates you can receive on students' writing and understanding and the ability to provide feedback quickly. Also, blogs provide students with an authentic audience. Kidblog provides a safe and simple platform for blogging suitable for elementary and middle school students. Kidblog allows the teacher to be the administrator and to monitor and control the blogging community in their classroom. Kidblog offers many features to control the privacy and content of your class's blogs. One great feature to Kidblog is that the students may be loaded by you so that they do not need to create their own accounts. The teacher creates the environment and students work within that community. This saves the hassle of establishing e-mail addresses for each student. Blogging is a great way to keep an interactive journal, reflection log, etc.. The use of blogs in the classroom is pretty much endless.

LiveMinutes

LiveMinutes is a web conferencing tool that allows the users to record dialogue and text, and share it, save it, or print it. The print-out is a very easy to read report. LiveMinutes also allows the users to share and annotate documents live over the web. It could be a great way to conduct a lecture or analyze a paper. The "discussion" that ensues can then be recorded for review at any time. With LiveMinutes, you could analyze the conversation you had with your students and adjust your following lessons accordingly - the purpose of assessment!

NoteStar

NoteStar is a web-based note taking site. This site is also listed in the "Organizational Tools" and "Collaboration Tools" page. NoteStar allows students to take notes, create bibliographies from the sites they have used, share and assign notes, and organize subtopics. I included it in the "Assessment Tools" because NoteStar allows the teacher to follow his/her students' progress and check in on them. Through NoteStar, the teacher can check for a source's authenticity, track progress, and leave messages. Just one more way to check a student's understanding.

Obsurvey

Obsurvey is an easy to use survey creator. There are many features on Obsurvey. Surveys can have mandatory questions, instant report filtering, reports can be exported as a PDF, and results can be shared live. Obsurvey also allows you to download charts and graphs based off your survey results. This site could be used to inventory learning styles, find interests, or any other learning inventory you'd like.

Polldaddy

Polldaddy is an online service that allows its users to create simple polls, quizzes, and surveys online. Polldaddy then generates a widget code to allow the user to post and display their poll and results on their blog, website, or preferred social network. Users can also leave comments on the polls, surveys, or quizzes. When creating a survey, quiz, or poll, you have your choice of single answer, multiple choice, or user-answered questions. There are no predetermined responses on Polldaddy, so the creator has to generate any multiple choice answers and distractors. All surveys created on Polldaddy are "fill in the blank" style. You may also leave custom start and finish messages on all your surveys. Results from Polldaddy tools can saved and printed in a report form. As earlier stated, the results can be collected on your blog, website, or preferred social network.

Project Based Learning

The Problem Based Learning web tool through 4Teachers.org is a great application for making project checklists. It is very simple to use. Just fill in the fields, choose your topics, and add your questions. You may either write your own questions or add the questions that have been pre-written by the authors of the PBL site. Once the checklist is created, save your link to your checklist and send it to the users.

QuizStar

QuizStar is a free online quiz creator. This site allows you to manage several classes, create quizzes in different languages, and allows students to complete and review the quizzes from any internet connected computer. Another cool feature of QuizStar is that you can attach multimedia files to the questions within a quiz. You can also make duplicate quizzes for multiple classes and share quizzes with other QuizStar users. QuizStar is also compatible with RubiStar, TrackStar, and NoteStar.

RubiStar

RubiStar is a handy site that allows you to create rubrics for various projects and class assignments. RubiStar has many templates to aid in creating quality rubrics. There are also tutorials that walk you through using the site. Rubrics are also available as premade products if you'd like. You can save and edit rubrics within your account and print them off. Rubistar also allows the user to add student results and analyze student performance.

Socrative

Socrative is an online student response system. Think of it like the web version of a Senteo machine. Only this version is free, not thousands of dollars! It is very simple to register, load, and use. To begin, the teacher sets up his or her lecture or class in Socrative and receives a "Room Number." The teacher gives the "Room Number" to students and they log into the Socrative classroom. When the teacher asks students to respond to a prompt, such as a multiple choice question, survey, or any other kind of question, the results are fed back to the teacher's device and there is instant data. Using this site does require that each student have some way to connect to the internet (Smart Phone, Laptop, Tablet, etc.). Socrative would be a great way to employ more all-student response questions rather than the typical initiate-respond-evaluate (IRE) method of questioning. Socrative also has a chat room option which would allow the teacher to harness the backchannel.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud is a great option for creating, sharing, and saving sound/audio. Audio files can be saved or embedded. SoundCloud has many possibilities. Create sound for your digital story. For band teachers/directors, have students record their practice and share it back with you. Record read aloud passages to assess fluency in reading. Or, record your lectures and discussions to post for homework or in a flipped model classroom.

TodaysMeet

TodaysMeet is a very simple web tool that allows the speaker to harness the backchannel. Essentially, it is a private chat room that you can keep active for up to a year. TodaysMeet does allow you to print a transcript of the running dialogue that takes place. I have used this many times with students as young as fifth grade. They are able to ask questions as they "pop up" and I get to them rather quickly. TodaysMeet is also nice for staff development days as people can share thoughts and ideas while a presentation is going on and the notes are available at any time with no risk of losing them in your notebook! I have used the transcripts to evaluate what questions students had and what I still needed to cover. I've also used TodaysMeet in place of 3x5 notecards for an exit card.

Understoodit

Understoodit is a browser app that allows the creator (presumably, teacher) to generate a simple poll to check for understanding. The poll is e-mailed to users registered under the creator's account and can be kept open and live throughout a lesson. As students respond to the "Understand" or "Confused" indicators based on the lecture, the teacher gets real-time information in the form of a graph allowing them to stop and clarify when necessary.

University of Wisconsin - Stout, Rubrics Page

From the University of Wisconsin-Stout comes this page of rubrics. You can find a template for just about any rubric here. It is a great collection of resources, especially for assessing digital projects. If you are creating a project and looking for a rubric to score it with, you will most likely find it here. It is definitely worth a look - it is great. I would not expect anything less from a University in the fine educational state of Wisconsin!