Digital Interactive Notebooks

Over the last month, and with the uncertainty of how we will re-open, I decided to make a move to digital notebooks using Google slides. Taking inspiration from Matt Miller's Google Slides Interactive Notebooks, as well as the thousands of teachers that came before me and graciously published templates (SlidesMania comes to mind) and YouTube videos, I came up with about 20 that I plan to use. As you know, I am all about sharing so I am publishing them all here for you to peruse and make copies if you wish.

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.

Formative Assessment Made Easy

Do you know where your students are? As you walk around the room today, can you state with some which students are ready to move on and which group do you need to pull for re-teaching? You know the answer lies in the use of formative assessments, but with all other things that pop up daily you may feel overwhelmed. If only there was a simple tool that would give you the necessary information...

GoFormative: 

With a few clicks, GoFormative allows you to create and share simple (and complex) assessments. You can use multiple-choice and true/false quick checks that are self-graded or add short-answer and "show your work" (where students upload images or draw answers). You can even provide feedback to the students as they answer in real-time. No waiting until they have all finished to gather data, allowing you to address minor misconceptions quickly. Best of all, absolutely free.

Flipgrid: 

This awesome tool allows your students to respond to your questions using video. You simply create a grid (i.e. post a question) and provide the link to your students. Your students can answer using any device they have, without having to create an account. Flipgrid can be used in lieu of traditional exit tickets, and it is much more fun to grade. Not free, but $65/year gives you unlimited questions and answers.

Socrative:

Socrative has been around for a while. This tool allows you to quickly assess your students through quizzes, quick question polls, exit tickets and space races (for those with a competitive edge or in a gamified environment). The tool can grade and provide you with visuals of the results making it easy to identify where each of your students is in their road to mastery.

What other tools do you have in your formative assessment toolkit? I would love to hear about them.