Riddle is a FREE web-based tool that allows users to create opinion polls, lists, quizzes, and personality tests. If you’re familiar with Buzzfeed (your students will be), Riddle allows you to create similar quizzes. It’s a fun and simple formative assessment tool to engage students, gather their opinions, and gauge their understanding.
Cool features of Riddle:
Templates to help you create quickly
Embed Youtube videos, and trim them to only the parts you want
Mobile-friendly, so students can use their smartphones.
30 languages available
Have option to reveal responses immediately or hide them until you’re ready
Share via hyperlink, social media, or embed into a website
Ideas for using Riddle:
Create a syllabus quiz or a “getting to know you” survey at the beginning of the semester.
Have students create lists, such as “Top 10 contributors to global warming,” to help them synthesize content or review for exams.
Incorporate a poll during class to gauge students’ comprehension of the material so you can adapt your lecture.
Ask students to create polls or quizzes to engage their classmates during presentations or discussion facilitation.
Use a quiz at the end of class as an “exit ticket”
This University of Texas professor created a top ten list of things students should know about her and her section of the university’s freshmen book club.
This quiz is about the “Space Race” between the US and the USSR during the Cold War.
The following article from eduTOPIA lists five formative assessment tools that you may want to explore http://goo.gl/ZoCSzo .
Two of the tools mentioned, Socrative and Kahoot, are tools that TLT have conducted session on in the past and have created step by step tutorials for which can be found at https://blogs.charleston.edu/tlttutorials/
Another tool mentioned, Plickers, is a tool that TLT has featured at our past FTI and will be featuring again at our upcoming Teaching Learning and Technology conference. You will have a chance to explore Plickers and hear from an Instructor about their experience using it in the classroom by attending the Faculty Discovery Lab and Lunch on 3/9. You must register for the Conference AND for this Lab and Lunch. Register at: https://goo.gl/4IoQJc
If you’ve ever asked your students “are there any questions?” you’ve likely received blank stares and shrugs. Assuming this to mean everyone understands the content, you move on. But what if students aren’t sure how to articulate what they don’t understand? Or what if they’re too shy or embarrassed to admit they are confused? Or maybe you’re simply looking for a way to get greater feedback from and interaction with students during lecture? GoSoapBox could be just what you’re looking for!
GoSoapBox is an audience response system (a “clicker” tool) that works on any device that connects to the Internet. This tool allows you to survey the class for understanding, quiz them on content, and encourage discussion. The beauty of GoSoapBox is the simplicity of the user interface despite offering numerous features. For example, “Social Q&A” allows students to contribute ideas and up-vote the ones they like. This could be great for an exam review: students submit questions and vote for the ones they really want to spend class time discussing.
The “Confusion Barometer” is a super simple way to gauge just how well students really understand the material. Instructors can see a live graphical display of how many students are confused by the material being covered and can then adjust their teaching strategy as necessary. GoSoapBox also offers quizzing, polling, and discussion board features, which allow for short answer/open-ended responses.
Students can respond with their names or anonymously, so GoSoapBox can be used to monitor students as well asallow sensitive opinions to be freely shared. Instructors can even export reports in spreadsheet form to track student performance.
So why explore GoSoapBox instead of PollEverywhere? If you have a class of 30 students or fewer, GoSoapBox is free and provides features that Poll Everywhere doesn’t, such as the quick and easy “confusion barometer” and threaded discussions. It’s also a simpler interface so it’s quite user-friendly, while PollEverywhere can sometimes be clunky. However, if you have course enrollment of over 30 students, I would not pay for GoSoapBox; our site license for PollEverywhere provides a great audience response system for free.
At the 2015 Teaching Professor Conference one of the sessions I attended was Topping Out on Bloom:Technology for Student Projects led by Ike Shibley. I found it to be very helpful when thinking about a technology assignment that encourages students to use Bloom’s. Below is a link to Dr. Shibley’s Obstacles/Opportunities table, questions for analysis of your course and the Padagogy Wheel which aligns Blooms with iPad apps.
Let’s be honest. Grading can be a drag. We may love teaching and mentoring students, but when faced with a stack of 100 essays, some of us consider a career change. Providing students with frequent and meaningful feedback takes a lot of time and energy, but there are plenty of applications that can help make you a more efficient grader. One such application is Kaizena.
Kaizena is a web-based platform that is synced with Google Drive. Students can either upload Microsoft Office files or PDFs to their Google Drive account (which CofC students have free access to) or they can create their assignments within Google Drive. The instructor will get an alert that a student has submitted and can then leave text or audio feedback as well as insert outside resources called “lessons” and 4-point scale ratings called “skills.”
Kaizena’s “lessons” are a fantastic time-saving feature. How often do you find yourself writing or typing the same comment over and over on student assignments? Well, “lessons” allow you to create a library of text, audio, and video resources that can be quickly added to students’ assignments. For example, if I were teaching composition and noticed multiple students making comma splice errors, I could record a quick audio clip explaining what comma splices are. Or, I could find a YouTube video about comma splices and use that existing resource. The next time I come across a comma splice error, I can simply click a button to add that “lesson” and avoid typing yet another explanation of comma splices.
Another aspect of Kaizena that I appreciate is how the feedback is framed as conversations. An instructor leaves an audio comment, for example, and the student can reply with text or audio. When we write comments on students’ assignments, we hope they read them and we assume they understand them. But often this isn’t the case. Kaizena encourages a dialogue between students and instructors that can improve understanding.
Multiple choice question creation is challenging and time-consuming. While question banks from the publisher can certainly benefit students by providing opportunities for practice, I prefer to create my own questions for exams to make sure they align with my learning objectives and the material I emphasized in class. While one of the main benefits of using multiple choice questions is the ease and speed of grading, one of the drawbacks is the amount of time invested in the development of each question. Various sources report that professional test item writers spend 30 minutes to 1 hour on just the first draft of a multiple choice question (1, 2). In some ways these numbers are reassuring as I know I am not alone in my occasional struggle with creating plausible distractors (choices) and targeting higher level thinking and reasoning.
During last week’s Faculty Technology Institute, TLT offered a session on best practices to improve multiple choice questions and exams. A number of tips resonated with the participants and led to a vibrant discussion. With multiple choice questions being so common, I thought the rest of the college community might gain new ideas from some of these discussion points. The summer is the perfect time to look back on exams from the past year and evaluate their effectiveness at measuring student learning. You might consider carrying out an item analysis on some of your questions to evaluate the difficulty and discrimination (3). Here are a few practical things to consider if you plan on revising your multiple choice questions:
3 options are optimal (in most cases).
A meta-analysis of over 80 years of research concluded that 3 options, or choices, are optimal for multiple choice questions (4). The analysis examined item difficulty, discrimination, and reliability and concluded that 3 options is best in most settings. I found this paper fascinating, and I was pleased to find out that I can spend less time trying to come up with plausible distractors for each question, while at the same time reducing the reading burden for students. Wahoo!
Parts of a multiple choice question.
Question order does not influence performance or completion time.
The majority of research on this topic indicates that question order has no effect on performance or completion time (5). This is great news as scrambling question order is one strategy adopted by many instructors to prevent cheating. Interestingly, students may perceive exams with randomly ordered questions as more difficult than chronologically ordered exam questions (5). This might be something to keep in mind if you often hear from students that your exams are really difficult.
Following all the item writing recommendations is really hard.
Avoid absolutes (always, never, all, none, all of the above, none of the above, etc).
Avoid negatives (all of the following except, which of the following is not true, etc.).
I know my past exams have included “none of the above” or “all of the above” as options. Faculty attending TLT’s sessions on writing multiple choice questions have commented that these recommendations can be hard, sometimes impossible, to follow. I am hoping to reduce my item flaws by cutting question options down to three.
Poorly constructed questions and exams negatively affect students, and they interfere with interpretations of the exam results. As an instructor, I want to make sure that my questions are reliable and valid. In addition to wanting my exams to align with my learning objectives, I want my exams to be a reflection of student learning in my course and not a measure of reading ability or test-taking savviness. The recommendations listed above have led me to rethink my exam format and reconsider some of my test questions. I hope they are useful to you too!
(1) Van Hoozer, H.L. (1987). The teaching process: theory and practice in nursing. Norwalk, Connecticut: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
(4) Rodriguez, M.C. (2005). Three options are optimal for multiple-choice items: a meta-analysis of 80 years of research. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 24, 3-13.
(5) Pettijohn, T.F. and Sacco, M.F. (2007). Multiple-choice exam question order influences on student performance, completion time, and perceptions. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 34, 142-149.
Our guest blogger is Ashley Brown from Health and Human Performance. In January Ashley was awarded an Ungrant for an iPod touch. Her goal was to film her kayaking students while they learn to paddle to help critique their performance and allow them to improve. Not only is this an interesting experiment into real-time assessment but also into exploring the waterproofing options for tablets and phones. There are many departments, such as the sciences and education, that can benefit from her trials with using the waterproof cases in the field.
I won an iPod Touch from the Ungrant through TLT!!
The Goal
My main objective is to video students paddling during their Coastal Kayaking class and give them feedback on their strokes and maneuvers using the Coach my Video app.
The Challenge
My first challenge was the hardware.The iPod does not like to work when it is wet.I have it in a waterproof case and a life jacket to keep it floating, but when I swiped my wet hands over the wet surface the machine just ignored me.Believe it or not I took it out two times before it occurred to me that the machine doesn’t work when wet, it won’t work when the waterproof case is wet, it won’t work when my hands are wet…so I’m still trying to figure out how to stay dry when I’m wet. I haven’t tried filming under water, but plan to when it warms up – by then I hope to have solved the ‘dry when wet’ problem
Then, after washing my face one might, I had a revelation; if a towel could dry my face…although I still haven’t figured out how to keep the towel dry.
The iPod is still not a big fan of wet hands, and it is hard to get them completely dry.
The Outcome
I had luck videoing the students and using the Coach my Video app to show them their work. However, I didn’t want to waste class time discussing each video individually, and still haven’t found an easily accessible way to project the video for the whole class to watch.So my next challenge is to send them their own assessed video.
I’m enjoying the new technology, and the challenge of using it in an environment where one of the first things I say to studentsis, “Lock your electronics in your car if you don’t want to lose them or ruin them!” is ongoing…maybe a really big ziplock bag…I mean really big.
Side note from TLT
We’ll keep following Ashley’s progress as she works through some of these issues. Check back to see the resolutions and more on student outcomes! TLT has longterm iPad minis and two waterproof cases available in our Checkout Equipment if you are interested in trying something like this in your classes.
Acclaim is a web platform which facilitates asynchronous discussion around video content. Students and instructors can add time-stamped comments that link to moments in each video. Each comment is clickable, and once clicked, the video will jump to the relevant moment in the video. Students can see and respond to comments at any time.
Users add videos to Acclaim in one of three different ways:
By embedding YouTube or Vimeo videos;
By uploading video files stored on a hard drive or mobile device; and
By using the built-in webcam feature to create and upload a video in real time.
How could I use Acclaim?
Assessing student presentations.
Peer evaluations of presentations.
Self-evaluations of presentations.
In flipped classrooms during which students watch video lectures outside of class.
Acclaim would be an ideal tool in courses that involve any type of oral presentations, demonstrations, or performances.
Why should I use Acclaim?
Watching one’s own recorded presentation and reading evaluations from peers and instructors can be an excellent way to identify strengths and weaknesses, and thus improve one’s future performances. Self-assessment encourages critical reflection, increased awareness of skills, and goal setting while peer-assessment develops empathy and encourages students to reflect on their own work while evaluating others.
Acclaim provides a free and simple platform that facilitates such self, peer, and instructor assessment.
ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) is the leader in supporting “the use of information technology to aid in learning, teaching of K-12 students and teachers.” This not-for-profit organization has created standards for students and instructors regarding the use of technology. These ISTE Standards are the standards for learning, teaching and leading in the digital age and are widely recognized and adopted worldwide.
The goal of these standards include:
Improving higher-order thinking skills, such as problem solving, critical thinking and creativity
Preparing students for their future in a competitive global job market
Designing student-centered, project-based and online learning environments
Inspiring digital age professional models for working, collaborating and decision making
While they were created for K-12 the principles and goals should also be embraced by those of us in higher education. Many of them are excellent goals to have even without the technology component.
Creativity and Innovation
Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology.
Communication and Collaboration
Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others.
Research and Information Fluency
Students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate and use information.
Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
students use critical thinking still to plan and conduct research, manage projects, sofve problems, and make informed decisions using appropriate digital tools and resources
Digital Citizenship
Students understand human, cultural, and societal issues related to technology and practice legal and ethical behaviour.
Pay attention to these standards next time you are creating an assignment or an activity for your students. Conduct an informal self-evaluation to see if you are encouraging these behaviors amongst your students and modeling best practices as the instructor.
Roundtable Discussion: Student Portfolios for Assessment, Reflection, & Employment is now available for online viewing. Panelists: Dr. Chris Warnick (English), Dr. Chris Korey (FYE), Dr. Beth Goodier (Communication), Dr. Kevin Keenan (Political Science), Denny Ciganovic (Career Services). Description: Five people give their take on student portfolios and discuss what they look for in a portfolio and the ups and downs of doing them. In the discussion they look at three types of portfolios: student reflection, program assessment, and employment.
