Distance learning made "easy" with Formative

A while back I shared 8 Reasons to Love GoFormative. All of what I mentioned back then still holds true, but in this new era of remote teaching, GoFormative has become the most powerful tool in my teaching arsenal. Let me share why.

It is important to note that some of the awesome things I'll be sharing are available to premium/partner users. However also important to state that GoFormative is offering access to their premium features for those facing school closures and that any premium features you use during this time remain active in your Formatives even if later you downgrade to a free plan.

GoFormative and Google Classroom

 GoFormative "talks" to Google Classroom. There is nothing worse than trying to introduce a new tool to students. That initial walk-through of setting up student accounts, having students remember passwords, etc is a pain even in the best of times. GoFormative allows you to import your classes, assign work and pass back scores to Google classroom. Students do not have to do anything other than click on the assignment in their Google classroom, log in to GoFormative using their Google credentials and get to the actual work at hand.

Everything in One Place

This is the best part. GoFormative allows you to embed practically anything directly into your formative assignment. What this means is that you can have a full lesson on Formative that starts with a screencast or video, then a simulation, followed by a slideshow and a Quizziz, all in one place. No need for students to open up new tabs or get lost while trying to remember where to go.

Last week I was tasked to give a PD on using GoFormative for distance learning and created this slideshow walking you through what I consider the best things to embed for distance learning.



And just to be clear, embedding is not a premium feature. It is always available as a stand-alone embed, though as a premium partner you can embed directly into a question type.

And while we are on the subject of embedding, if you embed a Google document using the "second way" mentioned above, and give editing rights to the document to your students, you can effectively transform that document into a discussion board that the students can type into while still in GoFormative!

Of course, if you want to close the "discussion board" you simply change the permissions of the document back to anyone with the link can view.

Real-Time feedback

Once students are working in your Formative, you can give feedback in real-time or asynchronously.  This GoFormative article shows you how. Now, while in a Google meet (or Zoom), you can also choose to display the student answers, hiding their names (which is an actual feature in GoFrmative) and have a full discussion about their answers.

Formative Library

If you don't know where to start or just want to find something quickly, GoFormative also has a library of teacher-created Formatives shared by teachers that can help pave the way to your use of GoFormative during this time.

Some more information about the use of GoFormative during school closures, including a recording of a webinar that walks you through setting everything up can be found in their article "COVID-19 Virtual Classroom Action Plan"

This is how GoFormative has made my transition to remote teaching easy. How about you, what tools are you using and found especially powerful during these times?

Hyperdocs using Formative

Formative (which you may know it as goFormative) is a platform that allows you to create assignments, assessments, and homework for your students. It is easy to use and frees up your grading time with their automatic grading feature. Most importantly, and one of the reasons I love it, it allows you to see live responses and with just one click identify the areas of struggle or misconceptions for your students so you can quickly pull a small group or even address the whole class before they leave for the day.

10 Reasons Why Teachers Use Formative (Goformative.Com)

Their wide variety of embeddable items and question types, make it an easy fit for creating Hyperdocs. Let me show you what I mean by using my Forces Mastery Quest Hyperdoc



I start by creating a Google Docs clickable image (like the one you see above), making it embeddable in the same way as I explained in "Embedding a Google Drawing with Clickable Links". Remember that the beauty of doing it this way is that once generated, you can go ahead and change any and everything, modifying the background or adding more clickable items as you go along, even including some Easter eggs if you wish. All changes populate automatically to anywhere you embed the image to, including Formative.

Once I have my main image, and I obtain the embed code,  I add it to what I call a Mastery Quest Formative (MQF). This MQF also houses my summative assessment, which most often is automatically graded by Formative.
The instructions at the top let students know that in order to click on the image inside Formative they will need to right-click and open in a new tab or window.

I then create each of the Formatives that will house the documents, images and activities the students will need to interact and respond to. In this case:

Engage, which includes an embedded Flipgrid
Explore and Explain which houses embedded videos and readings, all with checks for understanding along the way
Apply, includes an embedded Phet simulator
Share, housing a gif image and a Padlet that allows students not only to respond but to vote on each other's responses.
I do not include a reflection piece since my students write reflective posts each week as a matter of course. However, the Extend portion is hidden away in one of the Easter eggs (the little blue bird you see on the top right), and I provide a hint to its existence at the end of the Share formative. There are two other Easter eggs that I embedded as quick surprises for the students.

As with many other Hyperdocs that you may have seen, it is the planning and finding the content that you want your students to see what will take up most of your time. If you have your links, adding them to your image and putting the Formative Hyperdoc together is rather quick.

You may be thinking of those things that do not have a readily accessible embed code, like Gizmos for example. There are several Embed Code Generators out there, which are super easy to use. That is what I used to generate the embed codes I used in this Cell Cycle Formative, which like the Hyperdocs we are talking about is a Formative composed of several Formatives.





Although not as easy as providing links and tasks on a Google doc or slides, the end product(s) is actually much easier to asses.

In traditional Hyperdocs, every student gets a copy and submits it in some way, but you still have to open up each individual student Hyperdoc to see what they are doing and provide feedback. On Formative, this time-consuming task is eliminated since you can see all students' work in the corresponding formative at once. Easy to see that most students are having trouble with question 2 (for example),  and address the problem immediately, or that everyone is on the right track, but that whole back table has not registered an answer on item 4, prompting a visit from you.You can even display the chart, hiding names of course, and discuss a particularly challenging question or task, switching to your own preview so that everyone sees exactly what you mean as you explain or discuss with the students.

For those of you that may have given Formative a try in the past and have some questions or are simply curious to learn more about it, there is a growing community of Formative educators that is ready to welcome you. Hope you can join.