Chat tools and voting services provide great ways to hear from all students in a classroom. These kinds of tools, often called backchannel tools, allow shy students to ask questions and share feedback.
Backchannel tools also give our most talkative students a way to share their ideas without dominating the classroom conversation. Over the years, I have used a variety of feedback tools in my classroom. This is my up-to-date list of backchannel and informal assessment tools for collecting real-time feedback from students.
screen classroom
screen classroom is a service that allows you to create a home screen where you can place reusable countdown timers, stopwatches, polls, noise meters, random name pickers, and other useful classroom management tools. With the poll tool in Classroomscreen, you can show your students a question and have them answer with multiple choice selection or by choosing a smiley face.
ClassPoint
ClassPoint is a great little tool that you can use to create interactive quizzes and polls in your PowerPoint presentations. You can also use it to annotate slides, create whiteboards on the go, and share your annotations with students. In this short video I provide a demo of how ClassPoint works. The video shows a teacher’s perspective and a student’s perspective on how you can use ClassPoint in your classroom.
zipper
zipper is a service to collect feedback from your students in various ways. The easiest way is to create an exit ticket using one of the dozens of prewritten questions that Ziplet provides. Ziplet does not require students to have accounts to answer the exit ticket questions. Students can simply enter an exit ticket code that you provide before answering the question. What Ziplet offers that is somewhat unique is the option to respond directly to individual students, even when they are responding to a group survey. The purpose of that feature is to make it easy to ask follow-up questions or encourage students based on their responses to a question posed to the whole group. Here is a short video on how to use Ziplet.
rowed
i have been using rowed since WallWisher was called in 2009. Padlet me allows students to not only share the output responses as text, but also share them as hyperlinks. For example, if my students have been working on research projects, I’ll ask them to share a link to something they found that day along with an explanation of how it’s relevant to their research. Here is a set of Padlet tutorials.
Formative
Formative provides you with a place to create online assignments that your students can complete in class or outside of class. Assignments can be as simple as tickets out of a question like “what did you learn today?” to complex tests that use a combination of multiple choice, short answer, and true/false questions. You can assign point values to questions or leave them as ungraded questions. The best feature of Formative is the option to create “show your work” questions. “Show Your Work” questions allow students to draw answers or upload pictures as answers to their questions. When you use this question type, students will see a blank canvas directly below the question. On that canvas they can draw or write responses.
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