Diagnostic & Formative Tools
PollEverywhere has multiple features. It can create multiple choice quizzes, word clouds, question and answer, rank order, surveys, open ended questions, and more. I love using it to create word clouds. I use it for diagnostic purposes and formative assessment. It's quick and easy and the students' answers pop up on real time. It also shows the most common answers by making those words bigger.
FlipGrid is a collaborative tool which allows students to record up to 90 seconds worth of video (free version) or 5 minutes (premium version) in response to a teacher's prompt. After they've recorded their videos, students can respond to each other's videos with likes and stickers. FlipGrid is particularly useful as a digital citizenship tool to allow students to utilize video social media in a safe environment. It's exceptionally effective for giving students who are reluctant to speak in a classroom setting a voice. FlipGrid encourages high student engagement and can be posted directly to Google Classroom. It is available for the laptop, iPad, and smartphone.
Socrative is a very easy to use formative tool. Teachers can create multiple choice, true and false, or short answer quizzes or exit tickets. Socrative also has a game function where students create teams to see how well they have understood the material. Teachers get immediate feedback on student learning by receiving a percentage score per student as well as a table showing what answers students struggled. By sharing the class code with students, students can log on from any device. A nice way to mix it up!
Students have been enjoying using this software as an alternative to other mind-mapping softwares. The software incorporates keyboard shortcuts and allows students freedom to develop a mind map as they'd like. Each level of their mind map is automatically assigned a different colour which enables a move visual representation of ideas for students. Student can publish their ideas online or to social networks using this software.