Thing 18: Student Assessment & Feedback Tools

For this assignment, I actually implemented two new tools that I used within the week leading up to break: Plickers and Quizlet Live. 

I'm notorious for giving a Unit Exam right before a break, so of course, as April break approached, I was finishing up a unit and spending the class-before-the-test reviewing with students.  I reviewed in class on Monday-Tuesday, and gave the exam on Wednesday-Thursday (we meet every other day, and I have 3 different sections). 

I read about and asked other teachers about both Plickers and Quizlet Live to see which one they preferred for their students. What I found was that some teachers liked Plickers, while others liked Quizlet, and I decided, based on the makeup of my classes, that one class would use Plickers, while the other two would use Quizlet Live. 

I chose Plickers for my 4th period class because they are my challenging group. The SWD population is 12 (out of 26), and their needs are pretty significant. That class also is full of strong personalities, and they don't always work well together under pressure. Most students in that class (even the "clowns") prefer to take care of business independently when it is crunch time. Plickers comes off as an independent activity, but since we were reviewing for an exam, I wanted students to discuss the content and at least bounce ideas off one another.  So, every student had their own Plickers board to hold up for their final answer, but groups were encouraged to discuss and submit the same answer. Any individual in the group who truly disagreed was encouraged to try to persuade the group, but if the group insisted, that individual could still answer independently. This seemed to work really well with this class, because after a few students answered differently than their group, the group began to listen to the student who was the outlier. Overall, I liked Plickers, but it involved a good amount of prior setup to make sure that every student had a board to submit answers, and then adding in the layer with groups also made things a bit more difficult to manage. I think I'd stick to Plickers as an independent assessment or ticket-out-the-door type of activity. 

I chose Quizlet Live for my 1st and 5th period classes because they love working in teams/groups and really feed off of competitive spirits. After seeing how Plickers worked, and then seeing Quizlet Live, I'd be curious to see how my 4th period class would respond to Quizlet Live. My 1st and 5th period classes both loved Quizlet Live, which I expected. They held each other accountable for vocabulary terms as they reviewed, and they knew that they were still "in the game" if they were behind, because at any moment, another team could answer incorrectly and have to start over. And...the whole point of using Quizlet in the first place...they actually reviewed content that they needed to know for the unit test. As much as people say "skill and drill" and rote memorization is a thing of the past, it gets the job done in some cases and this was one of them. Student who were familiar with the content already seemed to know it more thoroughly, and students who were clueless learned a few new vocabulary words. 

Overall, if I had to state which one I preferred most, I'd say Quizlet Live. The students really got excited to see how their team progressed as each question was answered, and they loved the competitive nature of it. For basic vocabulary review, it did the job and made it fun.