There is certainly not a shortage of online tools for distributing quizzes to students and watching their responses in realtime. Formative is the latest online quiz and feedback service that I have tested.

Formative provides you with a place to create online classrooms. Your students join your classroom by entering the assigned class code after registering on the Formative website. Once your classroom is established you can begin distributing assignments to students. Assignments can be as simple as one question exit tickets like “what did you learn today?” to complex quizzes 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. You can also enable or disable instant feedback for students. When you give an assignment to students through Formative you can watch their responses in realtime.

The best feature of Formative is the option to create “show your work” questions. “Show your work” questions enables students to draw responses and or upload pictures as responses to your questions. When you use this question type students will see a blank canvas directly below the question. On that canvas they can draw and or type responses.

Applications for Education
When Infuse Learning shutdown earlier this year many teachers were disappointed by the loss of a great tool that allowed students to draw responses to questions. Formative’s “show your work” question format seems to have filled the void created by the closure of Infuse Learning.

The “show your work” question format in Formative could be great for gathering responses to math questions or any other question that isn’t easily answered by using standard keyboard functions.