GoFormative!

What's the best way to make sure students are reading? 

Well, quiz them of course. And I don't mean daunting, mentally taxing quizzes that cause students to fear failure whether they read or not. I mean a quiz that asks topical, content based questions that if students listen in class and do their assigned reading, they will be successful.

I know, all too well, the frustration of reading and coming to class to watch the kids who didn't read skate by with the same or even better grade than those of us who did. Two things happen from here. Either the kids who were once reading stop doing so because hey, I was only reading for class and if my grade isn't affected whether I read or not then I'm not going to. Or two, kids keep reading because they all love literature and stay up all night reading because YAY books I love them. Which do you think is the usual case? So, let's get students to read.

Now, how can I quiz students upon entering the class while avoiding the fumbling of paper, tedious procedure of grading every worksheet, and then finding out what questions weren't answered well? 

Let's eliminate these quizzing follies and utilize modern technology - GoFormative to the rescue!

I've been quizzing my students all week using GoFormative, and it's been such an effective way to check understanding. Goformative has an array of platforms to introduce the quiz to your students. For my most recent quiz, I did the basic multiple choice platform where I type in the question and answers myself. But there's also an option where you can take a picture of a quiz, worksheet, or an illustration, and then attach questions to different parts of the picture. My mentor recently did this with vocabulary. As seen below:

Whenever students click on the blue number their answer choices pop right up.

Not to mention, kids can draw if the teacher wants. And they can create silly picture illustrations for vocab words like one of my students did:

Students gain access to the quizzes by the code the teacher is given. The teacher retrieves the code after creating the quiz and clicking "Assign". Students enter the code into goformative.com/join. I have my students sign in with their usual gmail account. Teachers can also create classes, and each class has a code that the students enter into goformative.com/#signup. This way you can make the quiz or test accessible by class. It's a quick and simple process. Day one may be a little shaky, but when students get a feel for the program it saves massive amounts of time.

The program makes it easy to get access to answers. For my multiple choice quiz I can see the exact number of students who got each question wrong, along with how many were answered correctly. This makes it easy to know which questions might need to be gone over, or even thrown out of the quiz entirely.

Whenever I'm ready to grade work, I simply click "Export" in the upper right hand corner and the student names, grade, and answer choices are put into an excel spreadsheet. Easy. As. Cake.

While I'd recommend goformative to my fellow teachers, I truly wish they had a way to convert the tests and quizzes you make to a pdf file so that it can easily be stored in your computer drive, or even printed out for a student if necessary. 

I'm just beginning to get my feet wet in this program, but I've seen nothing but good things. Try it for your classroom! Click on the picture below to get started.

  

Best,