Eight reasons to love GoFormative

In a recent tweet, my good friend and colleague @JudyZaccheo posted the following "challenge"

After trying @Goformative years ago and hating it....I think I’m finally ready to give it another try 🤔 Tell me what you LOVE about it people! #Goformative @MarianaGSerrato

— Judy Zaccheo (@judyzaccheo) September 15, 2018

Since this cannot be answered in a mere 240 characters or less, I had to respond "long text", and what better way than a post that can then be shared with all of you.

Much like Judy, my first foray into GoFormative was perhaps a bit bumpy. At the time, I loved the idea of some of the question types I saw ("show your work", for example) so much that chose to present about it at a district PD, but I did not really use it much myself. This had nothing to do with the platform itself, but rather with my unfamiliarity with it. Back then, you created an account and landed on the home page but there was not much to see in terms of its capabilities, and my account remained dormant for a while.

About a year ago while participating in a Twitter chat, GoFormative came up quite a few times, and I went back in if only to see what people were talking about. That led me to the first reason why I love GoFormative:

1. The Formative Community Center: A vibrant community of educators that share content, best practices, implementation ideas and all sorts of ideas on everything from pedagogy to the latest in #edtech. What makes this community unique from others is that it also provides you with a direct line to GoFormative's amazing team of developers, who listen and respond with a "can do" attitude. To most of my "it would be wonderful if..." posts I have gotten a "we'll make that happen!" or at least a "we cannot do that right now, but what if we ...; would this be useful?"

Within that community and before some of the more recent changes that have made GoFormative super user-friendly, I found a great introduction to GoFormative made by Michael Lutz:
 Formative within a Formative, which helped me explore all the different things that could be done with formative, which leads me to the 7 other reasons why I love GoFormative:

2. Ability to create multimedia-rich lessons with just a few clicks. Not only does GoFormative allow you to include a wide variety of question types, you can also embed all sorts of media. It is almost an "if it is on the web, you can add it to a Formative".

Even if there is no obvious embed code on whatever you want to add, a simple iframe generated using the tricks learned in the Formative within a Formative mentioned above makes everything embeddable. In this "Relationship between Organisms" example, I have not only a presentation and videos, but also LearningApps and a Flipgrid.

3. Along the same lines, the "enhance a PDF/Doc feature", which allows you to digitally gather answers to anything you are already using, or add reflection questions to any formative, much like Rebecca Mann did in this example:

Our Formative Educator of The Day is Rebecca Mann! She uses #goformative to help her students self-assess their progress on learning standards!#formativechat#studentcenteredlearning#mathchat#hsmath pic.twitter.com/KauVLnlIjm

— formative (@goformative) April 25, 2018

4. Ability to assess and provide feedback in real time, with no lag! Gone are the days when you have to wait for a student to submit a paper or finish the digital work. With GoFormative you can immediately send feedback to a student or group of students - even whole class, while they are working on a formative.

5. Identify the struggling student, find patterns in answers and be ready to pull a small group or even get everyone's attention to clarify a misconception or difficult concept.

6. Track student progress towards mastery of standards. All you need to do is tag your standards, and Formative will summarize all the data for you!

7. Short on time? GoFormative now has a searchable library of ready-made formatives submitted by educators, searchable by grade level and content. No need to reinvent the wheel when you can clone to use as is and/or adapt to your particular situation

8. Google classroom integration. Whether you want to import your classes from GC or you want your formatives posted directly to GC, it is all available to your students with the click of a button. No need to remember passwords or try to find "what they are supposed to do".

Now, this is not to say that you have to do all of this. GoFormative is so versatile that you can even produce a quick GoFormative on the fly to act as an exit ticket or as a "Do Now" in a matter of seconds. That versatility is the reason why my students now equate GoFormative with being successful in my classroom.

Twitter, a Tool for Teacher Professional Development

Whenever I share my Twitter experience I face the inevitable, "Oh, I don't use Twitter", and I must admit that the first time I heard about teachers using Twitter, I was skeptical, too. My knee-jerk reaction was, "Social media is for keeping up with family and friends. Twitter, specifically, is for people that, at best, participate in politics and debates, and at worst those who enjoy instigating others. Why would a teacher invite that!" I completely dismissed the idea and patted myself on the back for not following in the trappings of social media.

The second time I became aware of Twitter as a possibility for me was at a conference. Like many others before me, I joined so I could post the happenings at that particular event, but it was more a feeling of shouting things out to the wind. I even remember that there were prizes given out for the most tweets, which pushed me a little to participate, but nothing more than that.  Follow others, why? At the end of that conference, I did not go back in. This cycle was repeated at the next event, and three or more times after that.

A couple of years went by and as I became involved with Edmodo as an ambassador, I completed the "Participate in an #edmodochat" challenge. That was the turning point for me. I started to read the posts, occasionally overcoming the risk of replying with my own ideas. All of a sudden I was involved in a deep conversation about best practices in education with a bunch of people that I had never met. That first hour went by in a flash, and at the end, I had specific ideas that I could put into practice the next day. I left that chat energized and hungry for more.

Fast forward to where I am now, writing about why educators should have Twitter accounts and participate in conversation often.

Twitter as Professional Development

Find and Share Resources

Gone are the days when the work of a teacher was a solo endeavor, or when you could open the file cabinet and teach the same lesson the same way for years on end. At our fingertips we not only have a plethora of resources, but these resources are constantly updated. New tools are imagined every day and ideas are flowing freely. Teachers all over the world are discovering and sharing ways to teach specific content and/or using ed-tech tools in a variety of ways. You may never have thought of using the board game Pandemic to teach about The Columbian Exchange, but @MatthewFarber has.

Staying Updated

Education is changing. Whether you are now an expert at the Common Core Standards, struggling to implement the 3 Dimensions of the NGSS, awaiting Social Studies standards or interested in changing your delivery to include PBL or gamification, the conversations are happening now. And wouldn't you know it, many of these conversations are happening on Twitter. Just take a look at the calendar of education Twitter chats below (managed by @cybraryman1, @conniehamilton, @thomascmurray, @cevans5095 and @jrochelle). You could say, "There is a chat for that!"



For those of you that have never participated in a Twitter chat and that may feel overwhelmed by trying to follow a conversation while remembering the "rules", here is a handy "How To" written by @kelseynhayes. The only thing I would add is the use of @participate's tool - Participate Chat simply because it allows you to focus only on that particular chat and automatically adds the #hashtag to the chat you joined, lessening the risk of tweeting to the wind.

Grow your Professional Learning Network

All of these educators that are sharing on Twitter and participating in Twitter chats are offering up their perspectives. They are also connecting with other educators who are willing to help out when the teaching work gets hard. Perhaps you are struggling to reach a particular student, and you need a sounding board outside of your own site. Maybe you would like to infuse more kindness or creativity into your classroom, or even would like to have a speaker come into your classroom, but do not know where to start. The PLN you create by using Twitter is there to help out. The beauty of this is that Twitter is available 24/7 so those ideas or questions that came to you at 2:00 a.m. as you were grading the last batch of essays can be posted and tagged to be answered by your Twitter connection in Europe as he/she starts the day.
In a similar vein, leaders in education are also on Twitter, and connecting directly with them is only a click away. Perhaps you are not ready to engage them in conversation, but you can infuse what you learn from their posts into your own practice. Here are a couple of lists to get you started:

• 36 Twitter Accounts Teachers Should Follow
• 15 Top Educators to Follow on Twitter in 2017

How to's

If you are ready to get started, I invite you to read Edudemic's The Teacher's Guide to Twitter, and if you are new to the Tweetverse, look below for a handy infographic.

Click to view the original

Source: Twiends