Earlier this week I had a chat with a teacher about the role of formative assessments in his classroom. As most of my conversations about education do, our chat eventually drifted into the various formative assessment tools that we’ve tried over the years. One thing that I’ve always tried to do when selecting formative assessment tools is to make sure that students can quickly access the assessment activity. One way that I’ve done this is by embedded the activities directly into my classroom blogs. Here are five tools that can be used to place quick, formative assessments into your classroom blog.

Formative:
Since this post is about formative assessment tools it makes sense to start with one that is actually called Formative. Formative offers an nice way to create multiple choice, open-response, and image-based quizzes. The image-based quizzes that you create in Formative can be embedded into your classroom blog where your students can then answer the questions in the quiz. In my video embedded below I demonstrate how to create the quiz, how to embed it into your blog, and I show you a student’s perspective of the quiz as embedded into a blog.

Vizia:
Vizia is a free tool for creating video-based quizzes. It can be used to create a short activity designed to help you determine if your students understand a concept or concepts demonstrated in a video lesson.

TodaysMeet:
TodaysMeet is a free backchannel tool that I’ve used for years. One of the ways that I’ve used it is to simply ask my students to respond to a couple of questions that I have posted in the backchannel. I’ll also use TodaysMeet rooms to have students ask me questions. You can embed TodaysMeet rooms into your blog or website. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how you can do that.

Dotstorming:
Dotstorming is a great platform for having students post ideas and vote on their favorite ideas. One of the ways that you could use Dotstorming is to post set of answer choices for your students and have them vote for the answer that they think is correct. Dotstorming activity boards can be embedded into blog posts and webpages.