You are starting a new teaching job or a fresh year of teaching. You may be wondering what some of the best online assessment tools for teachers are? At this stage, you’ve set your classroom up, gotten to know your students, and checked out your school’s software. But where do you start with assessing student performance? This is where online teaching assessment tools come in handy. These tools make it easy to mark assignments and create detailed reports on student progress and performance.
Assessing student’s knowledge is an integral part of the teaching process. However, sometimes it can be challenging to know how to assess student’s knowledge and still maintain a lot of flexibility in the process. A variety of assessment tools exist, each with their own pros and cons. In this post, I will be reviewing some of the best online teaching assessment tools for teachers.
Peardeck
Peardeck has been around since 2014 but has come to the forefront within the virtual classroom setting. It is an interactive slideshow where student participation and interaction are the main features.
Students view a slideshow controlled by the teacher while interactively responding to questions. In addition, teachers can add new questions to a Peardeck presentation on the fly! This helps to extend or add to the discussion, check for understanding, or simply ask the question again to gauge different responses.
Peardeck is Google Slide and PowerPoint accessible, in fact, you can turn any PowerPoint or Google Slideshow into a Peardeck.
To make it even easier to create, engage, and interact, Peardeck has ready-made templates you can choose from or you can create a Peardeck from scratch. Peardeck also has tremendous online support to get you started.
Miro
This online tool might be the virtual classroom gamechanger you’ve been looking for to formatively assess your students. Miro is an online whiteboard that encourages visual collaboration as if you are in the same room. There are multiple templates for easy integration, it’s simple to share with peers, and students can add content and collaborate in real-time.
A tried and true formative assessment is the K-W-L chart. In other words, an organizer to find out what students:
- know
- want to know
- have learned
Miro has a template for that!
Flipgrid
Students and teachers of all ages are flipping out over Flipgrid for good reason!
Flipgrid is a video creation tool and we know how our 21st-century learners love videos. There are multiple uses for Flipgrid including formative assessments.
Teachers create a grid with a topic and students respond with a video. Students can reflect on a lesson, collaborate with their peers and teachers, and use their voice via a video clip.
All the students need is a flip code and they are good to go. No passwords to remember, no login information (although they can create a free account), and a friendly, easy-to-use interface.
Not to mention, Flipgrid hits the ELA standards of Speaking and Listening! Win-Win!
Poll Everywhere
A bellringer is a great way to start your class, it allows for the students to come in, get settled, and get started on a task. This would be no different in the virtual classroom setting. A great way to formatively assess students in the virtual classroom is as simple as polling them via Poll Everywhere.
With Poll Everywhere you can ask interactive questions and get immediate feedback.
Students can use a mobile device to respond via the web or by sending a text message. They can also respond directly on the website by following a link to your poll. By embedding your poll into a PowerPoint or Google Slide presentation, it’s as easy as A, B, C, or D!
Here’s a silly example to show you what the data looks like.
Kahoot – game-based assessment tool
Students love Kahoot’s game-based approach to learning and assessment. Teachers can choose from more than 40 million ready-to-go learning games or create their own in minutes. Host games live or as assignments.
Students can even create their own “kahoots” to share with classmates, creating an interactive experience. Create a quiz game in minutes, import questions from spreadsheets, and search their 500-million item question bank.Want to add drawings from iOS or combine several mini-kahoots into a larger assessment? Kahoot can do that, and it can insert YouTube videos into your questions.Students can plan the assessment games by themselves or as a team, and teachers can add multiple choice or true/false questions to the games. The games are timed and scored, with point scales set up by the teacher. Plus, you can download basic reports in spreadsheets. It’s free to schools, with added features for $12 per year.
Socrative
Socrative is one of the top-rated assessment tools for teachers according to hundreds of online reviews by educators and professional reviewers alike. It’s an interactive digital tool that lets you quiz, grade, and assess on-the-fly; “at the speed of learning.” Teachers can choose from quick questions for instant feedback, class counts to see who’s logged in, or full quizzes for deeper understanding.
This versatile tool lets you create polls and activities and shuffle questions, with or without student names attached. Quizzes are graded in real time, and you can store them for re-use with other groups. It works on smart phones, tablets, laptops, and other devices on MS Windows, Android, and iOS. It’s 100% free for students, and it’s simple, flexible, and aligns well with Common Core.
iSpring Suite
iSpring Suite is a comprehensive eLearning authoring toolkit. It allows you to create interactive quizzes, surveys, and dialogue simulations for student assessment, as well as PowerPoint-based courses, video tutorials, interactions, and flipbooks. Despite having so many options, the toolkit is extremely easy to use and is perfectly suited for those who have no experience in eLearning content development.
Spiral
Spiral is a set of 5 apps for formative assessment. You can provide assessment in real time and hear from all of your students, turn slides into a discussion thread, let students create and share collaborative presentations, and turn videos into a live chat with questions and quizzes.
Peergrade
Peergrade is an online platform for hosting peer feedback sessions with students. Once you set up your assignment, learners start working on and then submit their work – text, files, videos, links, and even Google docs. Students can review each other’s works and act on the feedback. There’s also a teacher overview where they can see everything that is happening in the assignment.
Google Forms – easy to use and COPPA/FERPA compliant
The best reason to use Google Forms as an online assessment tool for education? Ease of use. Google Forms is a go-to among teachers because it’s quick and simple to create and automatically grade quizzes even if it’s your first time using the tool. Create multiple-choice quizzes or short-answer quizzes, and make an easy answer key with point assignments for each question.
Google makes it easy for students to answer questions by clicking a drop-down, typing a fast text answer, or posting a short YouTube video. Teachers can view graphs and summaries of frequently missed answers for a quick bird’s-eye view of the class as a whole.You can also share grades with students at the click of a mouse. It’s COPPA/FERPA compliant, though some teachers note a few concerns around privacy. See UMass’s tutorial on how to use the assessment tool.“I have been using Google Forms a lot. I also assess by checking their daily IXL and iReady. Google Forms allows me to create the assessment and see fast results,” Margaret Waters Hall, high school teacher.
Mentimeter – pre-built education templates
Pro reviewers and teachers score Mentimeter sky high among assessment tools used in the classroom. It comes pre-loaded with education templates for the classroom like a listening skills assessment, icebreakers, formative assessments, post-lecture surveys, and polls. Create quizzes and tests, manage student expectations, engage students, and even run a teacher training workshop.
Mentimeter gives everyone a voice, but it also has a neat feature to mute extra-loud students.It’s free to use and lets you create and host live quizzes either from its templates or from scratch. Pro versions for schools and universities add unlimited question slides per presentation, exports, unlimited quizzes, and support for a few dollars a month. The interface is 101-level simple, with tech support to smooth the bumps.
EdPuzzle
EdPuzzle is a tool designed specifically for working with videos. It allows both teachers and students to add voice-overs, resources, comments, and quizzes to videos. Instructors can also check if learners are watching videos, how many times they’re watching each section, and if they comprehend the content.
Quizalize
Quizalize is very similar to Kahoot. It lets you choose from over 12,000 official released tests to teacher-created resources or allows you to build your own. You can get instant data on each student’s progress and automatically assign various resources to students depending on their quiz score.
Nearpod
Nearpod is a web-based tool for making interactive classes with engaging activities like virtual reality, simulations, and gamified quizzes. It allows you to remain abreast of how far along your students are with formative assessments, including polls, open-ended questions, draw its, and more. You can get student insights in real time and in post-session reports.
Fluency Tutor
Fluency Tutor is designed to track and assess students’ oral reading progress. You can share reading passages with your class and receive recordings of the assigned passages. The tool comes with a library of over 500 ready-made reading fluency passages.
Poll Everywhere – used by 300,000 teachers
Don’t trust assessment tools for teachers that try to control your every move? Give quizzes, take attendance, and gauge understanding your own way with Poll Everywhere. It integrates with Google apps like Google Slides or MS PowerPoint and Keynote; as you prefer. It’s used by more than 75% of all Fortune 500 companies and by 300,000+ educators around the world. It also works on iOS and Android phones and tablets.
Get a snapshot of where students are struggling by creating questions as word clouds, open student responses, or with multiple-choice options. Then let students answer with their phones, laptops, or tablets.Teachers can get real-time feedback in their question slides without calling on specific individuals to roll out assessment as an integrated part of a larger lecture. This is a great way to give students a voice in steering the direction of live lesson plans.
Conclusion:
You may be wondering what online teaching assessment tools are. Well, it’s actually a good question! The goal of these tools is to give you a clearer understanding of how students understand the material.