Online Assessment

Assessment can be the bane of every teachers' existence. To some, teaching would be a breeze if there weren't countless hours of designing quizzes, marking tests, and inputing scores. The biggest thing that it comes down to is time. So why, in the 21st century do we not utilize technology more?

There are plenty of great online resources that can be used to create exams and quizzes, a list of which can be found here. I'm going to focus on two today, both of which I've mentioned before but now I'm going to go more in-depth. The first one is for summative assessment, the second for formative. The first is Google Docs. I have been using Google Docs for years and I was completely unaware that it had a quiz making feature. The feature, found under the free app SmartSheets, is very efficient. It is easy to use in that the quiz layout is simple: you can choose multiple choice, matching, short answer, etc. and quickly create a test that you can send out to your students. The best feature of this program is how it organizes the results. Rather than spending hours inputting scores in by hand, the program enters all of the information itself (after automatically marking the questions which you chose to have it mark). It not only tells you what the test scores are, but informs you which questions the most students got the wrong, which ones they right, and which students struggled where. For anyone who has ever designed a test, this knowledge is invaluable. It will calculate for you which questions are working and allow you to easily edit the exam so that they are improved for next time. It is a very effective summative tool.


For a formative tool I return to a website I've lauded before: Edmodo. I love the formative assessment of Edmodo because it's so easy. Students can respond to every assignment, quiz, or link posted by the teacher right as they encounter it. The teacher, of course, has the option to make these comments public or keep them private for their own records. The site also has a handy 'Reactions' feature where the students can respond by simply choosing an emoticon. Emoticon reactions range from 'I like it!' to 'This wasn't taught in class' to 'I'm bored'. The teacher receives these reactions in a nicely compiled list showing how many students and which students said what. This incredibly quick tool serves as a handy way to check where your students are at without a whole lot of effort.