Earlier this week at the ISTE 2016 conference I had a nice meeting with the founders of the popular assessment tool, Formative. Formative is hard at work to add new features in time for the new school year in the northern hemisphere. The list of features that they showed me is fifteen deep. Many of those features are focused on data, but some are focused on providing solutions to practical problems that almost every teacher has faced at one time or another while using online assessment tools. These are the five practical Formative features that I’m looking forward to seeing this fall.

• Send assignments/ quizzes to individual students. 
• Scheduling a start time and an end time for assignments/ quizzes. 
• Scheduling a time for the return of quiz scores/ feedback. You’ll be able to hold scores until every student has completed the assignment/ quiz. 
• Students will have a progress meter to show them where they are in a particular quiz/ assignment. 
• Improved font formatting tools. 

Applications for Education
One of the things that has helped Formative become popular is the “show your work” response option that allows students to draw responses to your questions and prompts. The addition of these new features should only help to make Formative a better tool for gathering formal and informal assessment responses from students.