3 Ways Okemos High School Enhances Formative Assessments
Educator Amy Huntley from Okemos High School in Ohio says that at first glance Classtime seemed like “a traditional assessment tool with some extra question types”, but she quickly realized that Classtime also provided features that enabled her to identify where her students were struggling and remediate. In this article, we’ll be discussing the three features that Amy uses to enhance her formative assessments:
Session Scheduler and Immediate Feedback for Flexibility
As a British Literature teacher, Amy likes to provide her students with practice quizzes before an actual test. She says that Classtime has made it easy to make practice quizzes available for students to access at any point within a given time period using the session scheduler. She says, “It was nice when I found Classtime because I could just put multiple practice quizzes in a session and tell my students that this week you are taking the first practice quiz whenever you want. When it came time for the actual one, they did better this year than they’ve ever done in past years on that quiz.”
Students were also able to immediately see where they were struggling. Amy says that not only does that help students to perform better on their actual test, but it saves her ample time in class because students were able to immediately identify what they needed clarification on completely on their own. “They could instantly see which questions they were getting right and wrong without me having to spend class time on it, which is really important since we have less class time,” she says.
Communicate with Students during Sessions with Student-Teacher Live Chat
One of the features that Amy found to be a significant advantage of using Classtime was the ability to communicate with her students while they were working. With Classtime, she has the flexibility to choose to reveal the right answer or not. When she chose not to reveal the answer, she was able to message students to give them a hint to try a certain question again.
“Sometimes I want to not reveal answers and give them the option to try the question again. So I could send them a little message in the chat to tell them which number to try again. That way they would score better, but I could also see their thinking in terms of what was their first choice and what was their different choice,” Amy says.
Wide variety of question types
What Amy really appreciates is the wide variety of question types that Classtime offers. She especially loves the hot spot and sorter question types as those questions require students to think deeply. For formative assessment, she loves the free text question because it gives her the ability to ask an open-ended question and pair students in groups for discussion. Amy says, “Forcing kids to move items to see cause and effect or move items to show that they understand history is important and something I was trying to do in various ways when testing kids before but Classtime did it nice and quick and easy.”
Learn to use the session scheduler, the student-teacher live chat, and Classtime’s question types.