Formative
Several of you amazing teachers have asked me to check out Formative and I have finally reached it on my to-do list. It was on the list several times so it is a popular request.
https://app.formative.com/
Formative is another option to create digital assessments for your students. Formative boasts it’s ability to assess students in real time and provide actionable data to help teachers determine what needs to be retaught before moving on. That only sounds like a good thing to me. Here is a quick look at the features of Formative.com
Let’s start with how to get your students connected. Under the Classes menu you click Add+, then Roster Sync, before connecting to your Google Classroom Rosters.
Plenty of pre-made activities came up for several searches I tried.
There are filters in the search tool to make it easier to find exactly what you need.
Creating activities we have numerous options of pre-existing documents that we can import and enhance.
We can also start from scratch with a brand new original assessment in Formative. Creating a new on the fly assessment seems like what should be your main focus with this tool.
We give our assessment a title and some quick directions so that students can ignore them.
We have LOT’s of options for question types. It looks to me like all of those new STAAR Item Types are represented.
We can ask students to respond with their voice as audio or a video (like Flipgrid). Categorize and Resequencing look like sorting question types. We have inline choice, match table grid, hot spot, hot text, and drag and drop.
Show your work give students a selection of tools to prove they know what they are talking about and will attach their proof to their submitted answer.
You can allow partial credit for questions with more than one answer choice. I appreciate that!
A Protractor and a ruler as well as Math formulas tool are available for students showing their work.
With all of the options this offers it seems like a VERY useful tool. So the real question is how much does it cost? Is it free? How much of it can I get for free?
You can earn 7 months of a free silver level account if you go through their online training program to learn about the system and set up a good referral network in your department.
Silver account status unlocks all of the premium features listed to the left. Silver accounts cost $12/month purchased yearly or $15/month on a month to month plan.
I have however started off with six weeks of Silver access just for signing up. Combined with the incentives above you could easily and cost free try out Formative for the remainder of this school year. Maybe you can get enough of your colleagues on board to convince your principal you need a Gold Account. ?
Gold accounts add on the features listed on the right on top of the silver features. Gold however is a school or district level purchase.
