Markify

Several months ago, I came across the free browser-based tool Markify.   Based on the times that I've tried it out with others in professional development sessions, and the feedback I've heard from teachers who have used it, I've been impressed enough to want to share it in a blog entry!

How does it work?

You can sign up with an email and password, or SSO with Google or Microsoft.  Once logged into your "Dashboard," you can sort through previous "Lessons" (recently used, shared by others, owned by you, or newest created) or start a brand new Lesson with a Board.  It can just be a blank page (set at various sizes, portrait or landscape), but you can also "Freeboard" ("create an unlimited canvas for whiteboarding") or upload a PDF.  

Once the Lesson is launched, you can (re)name the file in the upper left, use the annotation tools with the toolbar along the left side, or share it out in the upper right.

Let's start with the toolbar.  You have all of the usual suspects:

• "Selection," where you can select specific annotations,  or use the pan option to"grab" the board to move around in the canvas, or multi-select objects.
• "Draw," where you can change the color,  thickness, and opacity.
• "Markup," where you can underline or highlight text or graphics (again, you can change color, thickness or opacity).
• Erase
• "Text Box," which offers both rich text and equation options.
• Shapes
• "Stickies" to create sticky notes with customization of color, text, inserting hyperlinks, etc., "watermarked" with your name in the lower right.
• "Comments" to insert feedback or an observation, which also indicates who made the comment.
• "Page," where you can insert something onto the space that can be made small or big.  Think of this as a simple "Board within a Board," where you can (for example) bring in another PDF and provide another place or thing to annotate upon.
• "Media," where you can embed a YouTube video or upload an image.

You can also create multiple whiteboard pages within your space.

Of course, annotation by yourself can get lonely!  That's where sharing comes into play.  You can launch a Lesson and allow others to instantly join without them needing to create accounts.  (They are asked to give their name when they join.  This is where expectations and norms come in -- of course students may give goofy names or even be asked to do so to remain anonymous, but if you don't have real names, you can't give real credit for contributions.)  Also, Markify is device agnostic; someone can join from the mobile browser of their phone just as easily as the browser of their Chromebook.

Note that for all the various ways collaborators can join, by default all of these are "view only."  They will see whatever annotations are being made in real time.  However, at some point, you may want others to join in on the fun, and that's where Markify really shines as an innovative tool.

As the person who launched the Lesson, you have total control of who and how many can annotate, and for how long.  You can grant someone annotation permission but also revoke it at any time, and whether you have just one or a dozen or thirty friends with editing rights is up to you.  There's even a way to toggle off certain annotation tools so they cannot be used (by default, all are available for participants). 

From the student's interface, their options are initially limited.  They can move around the Board with the select or pan tool, possibly copy text or a hyperlink -- and that's it.  However, you can choose to give editing rights to any "Viewer," or recognize when a student "raises their hand" to participate.

Taken from an Android phone. Note the "raise hand" icon at the top of their toolbar; students can request editing permissions, but can also "lower their hand."

From the teacher's perspective, you can give a student (or students) editing rights, lower their hand, observe just their movements within the Lesson (even if it's just clicking or panning), or remove them from the session.  Markify will indicate if students are idle, or viewing something else in another app/tab.

At the end of a session (or at anytime), you have other options by clicking "File" in the upper left, next to your Lesson's name.   From here, you have options like exporting to a PDF (each page separately, or everything as a single page, or selected elements), print, or even see a "timeline history" of each participant's contribution.

The newest feature is Breakout, where you can "allow for lessons to be 'broken out' into individual or team work." (There are limited sign ups within Markify for early access; this seems poised to be a premium feature once it's publicly released.) You will create a Lesson as normal, which will become the "base document" replicated for each group.  You then can use "AutoPair to put members into teams randomly (or groups of one), Team Up to allow members to pick their team, or manual to setup teams yourself."  You can monitor each group while they work, and even see a "percentage of work" indicator for each group member in order to determine the proportion of each student's contributions.

A brief overview video (1:26) of Markify is here:

How could you use it?

Markify is a great way to monitor and manage digital collaboration.   Consider the chaos of creating a typical Google Doc and making the link editable by everyone, then having thirty students suddenly clicking and typing simultaneously.  With Markify's granular permission system, you can make contributions become a flood or a trickle.  While Breakouts may be a premium feature, it shows yet another way to have students work together that can be tracked and assessed and somewhat private, without worrying about a student typing "the teacher is an dweeb" for the entire room to see. (And remember: you can choose to toggle off certain tools like text box and comment.)

By starting a session, you can either project the teacher view at the front of the room, or students can follow along in real time on the screens of their individual devices.  As a direct instruction move, you could then model ways to annotate text before allowing them to do the same (perhaps even with hard copy of a text and old fashioned highlighters and pencils!).  Or, after having a clear conversation about expectations and norms, have a classroom "conversation" in real-time using Markify as the common space to "talk" through the analysis of text or a graphic. 

Downsides?

It's hard to quibble with a free tool that allows for such meaningful collaborations.  It might be nice to have an option of importing an image or YouTube video from the start of a Lesson (right now, the only file choice is a PDF), but of course you can easily upload numerous media once the Lesson is created.

Thanks to Markify showing us that there are still some new, free digital tools we can try out in the classroom!

Have you tried Markify, or have a similar app to recommend?  Make a Comment below!

Snorkl

As a former high school English teacher, I always felt pressured to provide useful, personalized feedback quickly.  Digital tools like the Comment feature in Google Docs became popular just as I was leaving the classroom, and certainly shifted the paradigm when it came to giving "just in time" quality feedback.

Now, thanks to artificial intelligence, we are on the precipice of the next generation of digital feedback that can transform teaching.   For some time now, genAI chatbots like ChatGPT already offer an augmented opportunity to comment on student writing -- if you are willing to engineer a prompt for what you are looking for, then copying and pasting each student essay into the tool, then copying and pasting any AI feedback you wished to share back with a student.  (You can even include your rubric in your prompt, so you can get your feedback with a suggested assessment score.)  This is free and helpful, albeit time consuming and clunky.

But now we enter what I am calling the "refurbished" phase of AI.  In these newest AI tools, the programming is more hidden under the hood, while the interface is much more user friendly and less dependent on prompt engineering.  And that leads us to the tool for today's entry: Snorkl.  While its strength in providing feedback for solving math problems seems obvious, its potential for analyzing reflection and metacognition in multiple content areas is also apparent.

How does it work?

You can sign up free with a Google or Microsoft account.  Snorkl will ask you whether you are a teacher or a student -- I'm not sure how easy it is to change this if you answer wrongly, or are wanting to see what the other side is like before trying to return to your standard role, so choose wisely.

Your home page is intuitively organized with several options.  A "Getting Started" box provides light tutorials for how Snorkl works. Some videos to watch are in "Resources."  You can explore premium plans; although a free account gives you unlimited classes and co-teachers, you have "limited" activities -- an actual number is not specified.  Last but not least, you can create a class where you can then make activities for students (a share link for your activities makes it easy to get students jumping in).

Your Home tab.  Note the tabs across the top for Classes and Library (see below).

What does Snorkl feel like for a student? In the pre-made "Try as a student!" section, several prompts are given so you can experience Snorkl for yourself, and reveal its potential for a wide range of content.  For example, there's one for "Trig Ratios," and another that asks you to "Identify the author's feelings about New Orleans in this 4th grade ELA assignment."  I was intrigued by the "Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich" activity -- a classic writing prompt I used years ago with students to show the importance of details when describing "how to" instructions -- so that's the one I chose.

When I opened it up, I first encountered the "Response Whiteboard."  

The activity's instructions are in the upper right, which can also be read aloud to the student.

As you can see from the toolbar at the top of the whiteboard, there are several buttons that allow you to insert text, pictures, and formulas for your response; while you can use the mouse/trackpad to draw, it's probably not as natural as using your finger or stylus on a touchscreen device. (This is the same whiteboard interface the teacher uses when creating the activity prompt for students.)  However, "Record Screen + Voice" is where the real magic of Snorkl resides.  While you can write or draw to your heart's delight before hitting this button, you really can't submit your response unless you make a recording.  That's because Snorkl takes what you say and converts it to text for the next step of the process. Of course, like any screencast, you could draw and type as you talk.  (The first time you do this, you'll be prompted to give permission for Snorkl to use your microphone.)

Once you submit your response, Snorkl uses AI to, in effect, analyze your thinking out loud and tell you how well you did.  The first time I responded I didn't doodle and simply talked through how to make a PB&J.  After several seconds, I got back this screen:

The comments on the right are timestamped; click on the time and you can go straight to that part of the recording.

I have to admit, this had me pretty slack-jawed.  You can play back your recording, with a running transcript in the form of captions.  Snorkl provided some simple overall feedback ("Correct," "3/4 Strong") followed by impressively detailed commentary.  Even the tone seemed appropriate -- Snorkl celebrated my strengths ("Great job on giving a detailed explanation...I love how you even included the part about opening the bread bag") while also providing me ways to improve ("Have you tried using the same knife for both the peanut butter and jelly?").

If you like, you can do another response, with either a clean whiteboard or pick up where you left off.  These additional responses become a history that you can revisit and review, to see your growth over time.

The Portfolio tab shows how Snorkl can be a place for artifacts for learning; for example, imagine a student pulling out a response during a student-led conference with their parents. 

Of course, teachers can review and play the videos of these submitted responses.  Once several responses have been submitted, Snorkl's website suggests that a teacher will be able to see some class-level insights, such as "top exemplars" and "common misconceptions," but it is also possible such insights are only fully available as a premium feature. 

Snorkl calls itself "a versatile tool for all subjects, used from elementary through college."  As an additional nod beyond the "try as a student" examples indicated above, the platform also provides some pre-made activities in several content areas and grade levels in its Library.

The library bank already covers many grade levels, with more "coming soon."

Finally, for a video on getting started with Snorkl, watch the following (3:24):

How could you use it?

Students could be assigned a Snorkl task:

• as a more interactive type of "flipped learning" homework
• during class as part of a blended learning station rotation
• at the end of class as a formative assessment exit slip to determine if they understood today's content (and give the teacher data on what misconceptions to address for tomorrow's class)

Downsides?

Snorkl offers some powerful features for free, so it is hard to find faults with the tool itself beyond just how many activities you can create at no cost, or the possible limitation of the drawing features if you don't have a touchscreen device.  From a teacher's perspective, it truly can become a powerful "instructional aide" (not teacher replacer!) in your classroom.  A more likely negative is about the potential for a teacher to overuse the tool, or use it without also checking student work in person.  As always with edtech -- especially with AI -- practice moderation, oversight (it's not always right), and balance.

Have you used Snorkl, or a similar AI tool?  Share your stories in the Comments below!

Figjam

While I didn't attend ISTE 2023 in person last month, I watched the social media about it from afar.  One tool that came up repeatedly was Figjam.  The enthusiasm I read about it encouraged me to try it out for myself.  The result was endless grinning and multiple Keanu Reeves-like "Whoa's" as I played around with it.  Figjam is basically a browser-based collaborative whiteboard tool, but considering the possibilities and the joy it sparked for me, that somehow feels reductive.  My hope today is to convey that joy of possibilities to you.

First, a clarification.  Figjam is technically a program that has emerged fairly recently, but it's actually part of Figma, a popular industry-standard design tool that's been around for years and used by the world's top corporations and designers.  In order to use Figjam, you must create a Figma account, and that ends up giving you access to both tools.  Figma is a powerful program with some features that overlap with Figjam.  Figma is certainly worthy of its own blog entry -- and there are teachers and students who are definitely using it! -- but in my limited time of playing with it, I found the learning curve to be a bit steeper, and its application seems limited to product-oriented projects that may require designing and prototyping.  On the other hand, Figjam feels user-friendly right out of the box, and has the potential to be used by educators and students for learning on a much more frequent basis.

Strap yourselves in, because I'm about to make a new Edtech Elixirs world record for most screenshots in a single blog entry!

How does it work?

As you sign up (using your Google account is my recommended option), there is a process where you verify your educator status.  This takes a minute, but totally worth it, as you will get the full enterprise edition of Figjam (and Figma!) for free.  Let me repeat that: even if you were willing to pay something, there are no other premium features, because as a teacher or student you get the whole ball of wax at no charge.  A round of well-deserved applause for Figma's patronage to education!

Once you are logged in, your home screen will present you with several options, including opening up a previous Figjam board, making a board from scratch, or starting with a template.

This is what your home screen looks like if you're looking at your "Recent" files (see the upper left).

Let's jump right away to discussing Figjam's templates.  The bench is deep on this one.  In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a web tool that has so many useful pre-made models.  Within sixty seconds you could conceivably launch a learning activity with students.  While there is a whole template category "for the classroom," the other categories give you an idea of how versatile Figjam can be for brainstorming, having a meeting, planning a project, and more.

You will likely find value in using a Figjam by yourself, but why be lonely?  It really comes alive when collaborating with others.  While you could create Teams with students or colleagues for ongoing work on particular Figjam boards, I love how you can also open up a board to anyone for 24 hours and they don't even need a Figma account.  If you can give someone the URL, they can join you and work on the board in real time.  (Here's a timecoded link to a video showing how sharing works; it's at the 17:25 mark.)

By simply hitting "Start" and "Copy link," your students, colleagues or PD attendees could be seconds away from joining you in a "jam session." Note that similar to Google Docs, you can also limit a board's viewing or editing to specific people.

The interactivity of Figjam is user-friendly and straightforward, mainly centered around its toolbar at the bottom of the screen.  You can participate in multiple ways, such as drawing, inserting shapes or sticky notes, making line connectors between elements, using stamps and emotes, and more.  There are also some clever "widgets" available to use.  You are even able to have an audio chat with others in the Figjam board, which can make it an alternative teleconference-style meeting.

An annotated Figjam toolbar, slightly edited from the original found in the "Figjam 101 Overview for Education" Template...yet another aspect of Figjam that I appreciate, which is how many Templates they have that also function as tutorials.

Voice Memo (allowing you to record your voice for up to 30 seconds) and Photo Booth (which uses your webcam to take a selfie) are two particularly useful (and fun!) widgets to put on a board.

As a facilitator of the board, you'll enjoy the built-in timer in the upper left of the screen, as well as the opportunity to play some ambient music.  This can be particularly useful when participants have some work time for a portion of your live session before coming back as a whole group.

Here are some helpful shortcuts and tips that participants can use inside Figjam:

• E for Emotes/Stamps.  
• Tip: While in the Emotes/Stamp wheel, click once on a stamp choice so you can stamp with it multiple times.  You can also hold down you mouse to grow the stamp bigger and bigger until you release it on the whiteboard.
• S for a sticky note.
• X for connectors, and drag cursor to where you want arrow to stop.
• / to open a cursor chat for live interaction (not to be confused with making a more permanent text comment).
• Tip: be mindful when you are in "pointer mode" (which means you can select and move elements around on your board -- perhaps unintentionally!) and when you are in "hand" mode, which allows you to move the entire board around in order to navigate.  Until you get used to this, you may be using Edit>Undo a lot.
• Hold H and move cursor for waving your hand at other participants.  Then they can give you a high five!
• Tip: Copy and paste a URL into a Figjam to create an embedded website or YouTube link.  (This works for Google Docs too!)
• Tip: If logged into the platform on your browser, go to figjam.new in a new tab to quickly make a brand new board with some simple template options on the left side.

The landing page when you go to figjam.new. Note the quick template options on your left.

What if you want to share your board with others outside the platform, or want to save a "snapshot" of the Figjam for archiving your current progress?  You can export the board as a PNG, JPG, or a PDF, either in its entirety or just a selected portion.

Another excerpt from the "Figjam 101 Overview for Education" Template.

Here's a short overview video of some of the basic collaborative features of a Figjam board (2:48):

How could you use it?

I've threaded some examples of use throughout the narrative above; if you're stuck for ideas, check out the massive list of different templates available!  But I'll add a few more.  Figjam can be a powerful way of making thinking visible for learners, as well as providing a wonderful digital space for collaboration and planning.  Additionally, a person could use Figjam as an alternative presentation tool, either in person or as a shared screen in a teleconference -- you could set up its sections in advance and zoom in, out and move as appropriate to highlight the next part, as well as explore an image, play a video, or visit a website.  Lastly, because of its export feature, both teachers and students might use Figjam as a designer tool for handouts, logos, and other graphics. 

Downsides?

You know you're struggling to find fault when the worst thing you can come up with as a downside is the number of questions you have to answer when signing up in order to validate that you are an educator. It's really remarkable how much Figjam can do, and all at the cost of zero point zero zero dollars.

I hope that you try out Figjam with your students soon.   If you do, leave your story on how you used it in the Comments below.  Now go out there and get Figjamming!

Editor's note 11/19/24:  Figjam now allows you to lock down elements of your board -- whole sections! -- which can prevent users with editing access from accidentally moving parts around that they shouldn't.  See the following tweet:

This is a gamechanger! By locking a section, all of the elements contained in it can't be edited or moved. That includes all user additions up to that point (comments, post-its, etc.). However, NEW comments, sticky notes etc can be added "on top." #KYDLC #EdTech https://t.co/mJ6NrjhiRW

— Adam Watson (@watsonedtech) November 19, 2024

Explain Everything (Web Version)

Explain Everything is a tried-and-true digital whiteboarding tool that has been around for many years, although in full disclosure mode,  I have been more familiar with a similarly functioning iOS app ShowMe (one I've mentioned several times on this blog).   Both of these have mainly been known as tablet apps.  However, I discovered that Explain Everything now has a browser-based version, and even if the phrase "game changer" is way overused, I think it applies here -- especially if you're looking for a useful presentation tool while facilitating a concurrent or virtual classroom.

How does it work?

Firstly, you will want to make an account.  Free is an option (but see "Downsides" below for more on the paid options); you can use Google or create an account through any email.  This will enable you to save and revisit "Projects" as well as collaborate with others.  When you first use the site, you need to allow it to access your microphone.

Explain Everything can be used presentationally or collaboratively. Its robust features that differentiate it from other types of whiteboard tools start becoming apparent from the minute you launch it -- you can choose a blank canvas, but several useful project templates are also available like storyboard, timeline and Venn diagram.

This is an example of the Explain Everything template "Meeting."

Your annotation and presentation tools are along the left side.  They include the usual suspects such as a Hand (selector), Draw, Highlighter, Eraser, Shapes, Text, Add Media, and a laser pointer.   You can zoom in and out of your Project in the bottom left.

Another innovation for Explain Everything is how collaboration can occur.  In the upper right, once you are signed in, you will see an Invite Code for your Project.  This can be shared so that others can instantly join you, from either entering the code at the main Explain Everything site or as an option when someone first launches the browser app.  

If you click on this invite button, you can see other options.  You can share a URL to your Project, change your access permissions (for example, anyone with the link can only view), or change the Scenario from the default of "open collaboration" (everyone works together freely) to "presentation" or "interactive broadcast" if you plan to screenshare your Project.  Using your microphone can allow your collaborators / viewers to hear you as you whiteboard.  

Lastly, there is a screen capture tool that allows you to record, or screencast, whatever is within an adjustable frame, which can also include you narrating from your microphone.  Creating a screencast will also open up some video editing features, but there are limits in exporting video with a free account. (Note that when "Adding Media," one of the options includes using your webcam to take a picture; you can also insert existing audio.)

For a short overview of how the internal screencasting and clip editing can work, watch the following video (2:04):

How could you use it?

Explain Everything creates an immersive interactive space to collaborate and ideate with colleagues.  Students may do the same, especially with working through a compare/contrast of two concepts, making a storyboard plan before recording a film, or capturing prototype ideas during design thinking.  

You could also use the tool presentationally to an audience.  This audience could be experiencing your Project live via screensharing during a teleconference meeting, or asynchronously by watching a screencast recording. 

Lastly, and obviously, Explain Everything is perfect for a concise explanation of a concept or process, in a way more engaging than simply narrating as you click through static slides.  Explaining math processes in particular would be a natural for such a tool.

You might consider getting around the limitations of video exporting by screencast recording with another tool (like Screencastify or Screencast-o-matic), but the trade off would be the inability to use Explain Everything's internal editing, or potentially sharing videos on its own cloud service.

Downsides?

The free version of Explain Everything only allows up to 3 projects, 1 slide per project, and 1 minute of exported video.  Because of these limitations, you will likely want to consider getting a paid version of the tool.  Current pricing is reasonable, however; for $24.99 a year, you can have unlimited projects, slides, and recordings, as well as 1 GB of cloud space. Also, if you use Chrome, make sure hardware acceleration is on or else you will have to use another browser.

Explain Everything was already (and remains) a highly useful tablet app, but this new browser-based version means theoretically that any laptop or Chromebook can now use it too.   Consider it as an alternative to Google Jamboard or Padlet the next time you want to collaborate in a small group, or as a new way of presenting your ideas to an audience.

Do you use Explain Everything? Do you have a different favorite digital whiteboard tool?  Share in Comments below!

YoTeach!

While there are certainly very effective ways to have classroom discussion the analog way -- look no further than a well done Socratic circle -- digital discourse can be uniquely powerful.  It has always been a particular specialized edtech interest of mine, going back to my U of L graduate classes in the early 2000's.  As one of my action research projects, I gathered data on college students who raised hands in class to answer questions versus their participation in online forums.  Perhaps not surprisingly, while nearly all students interacted digitally, "real" discussion in class was limited to roughly half the classroom, and only a handful of students tended to dominate the conversation.  Sound familiar?

Besides making the simple amount of participation more equitable, other advantages of digital discourse became readily apparent:

• Because students could think and even revise their questions and observations before hitting send, the responses can be a bit more thoughtful.  However, responders can also be "trigger-happy" and the quality can be just the opposite, so culture and expectations are key here.
• Digital opportunities opened up asynchronous as well as "real-time" opportunities to talk, expanding discussion beyond the four walls of the classroom.
• Dominating personalities in real life become more flattened -- quiet students could sound as "loud" as their more outgoing peers.
• Students more naturally talk directly to each other, rather than through the teacher.
• In a real time online discussion, everyone can "talk at once," something not possible without shouting and chaos in real life.
• Digital discourses can often be easily archived or exported.
• Since a digital discourse creates a physical artifact, it can be formatively assessed, whether with informal feedback or with rubrics that indicate how students are meeting mastery of speaking and listening standards.

One of my favorite and free digital discourse tools was TodaysMeet.  It was around long enough (ten years!) that I actually used it as a classroom teacher for one of my videotaped National Boards lessons.   Alas, it finally closed down several months ago.  Since then, I've searched for alternatives and finally found one that is as simple (and free!) as TodaysMeet -- YoTeach!, a project of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.  (More about their "Pedagogic & Active Learning Mobile Solutions" here.) 

How does it work?  Once you go to the site, you can make a chat room in seconds.  Type your room's name and hit the "Make Room" button.  Share the room's URL, and people can join the chat instantly -- no log in or user account required, they just pick a nickname.  While technically users are anonymous, two tips: explain to students that the only way they will get credit for their contributions is if they use their real names, and advise them to use common sense digital citizenship protocol (never say anything you wouldn't in a public space with Grandma listening).

YoTeach! does offer some very helpful features.

• By checkmarking "Avoid Search," the room will not show up in public searches, and gives you a bit more privacy.  I highly recommend this!
• "Enable Admin Features" is also highly recommended.  By creating a password for you (unique to the room you are about to create), you will be able to do some moderation features such as mute or remove a student, get student participation statistics, switch from a chat to a voting mode (perhaps as part of a reflection at the end of the day, where students indicate the most insightful or important contributions), and more.   The only way you can make sure a room can be deleted is if you enable admin features from the beginning; otherwise, the room and its history will linger indefinitely.
• "Room Entry Password" is another security feature to protect your students. Without a password, anyone with the chat room's URL can join. 
• In the chat room itself, participants can do more than just text responses. You can also share pictures with annotations, or use a mini-whiteboard feature to "draw." 
• You can export a transcript of the chat as a PDF.

Richard Byrne, edtech extraordinaire behind Free Technology For Teachers and Practical Edtech, did a great screencast video overview of YoTeach! (5:15):

How could you use it?   Here are three ideas:

1. Create a backchannel chat while watching a video.  The opportunities for students to post questions and insights, as well as the teacher probing and clarifying, can create a rich, engaging experience beyond just passive viewing.
2. Create a virtual after-hours office, where you help students during a scheduled time slot.  Even better would be student leaders running the chatroom doing the same function.
3. Conduct the equivalent of a "Twitter Chat" at a certain time after class on a particular topic. This could be a remediation opportunity, enrichment, or even a flipped learning experience of content that will directly lead to work in class the next day.

Downsides?  Without the teacher having a login account, there is no way to easily save all of your created chatrooms.   (This was true of the earliest version of TodaysMeet as well.) If you close the browser without somehow saving the chatroom URL, you may have to start all over.  I'm also not sure if the ability to search "public" random chatrooms is helpful from a student perspective, since it may lead to more distractions than anything useful for a classroom setting.  In fairness, however, once a student joins a specific chat room the search is not readily apparent.  Lastly,  I wish rooms were "yoteach.com/name" (more like how TodaysMeet worked) instead of the current unusual URL address configuration.  

I wish for digital and analog discourse to happen frequently in your classroom!

Note: special thanks to Noel Gnadinger, my old South Oldham High School colleague and librarian par excellence who led me to YoTeach! in one of her Facebook posts.

Revision 9/26/19:  The YoTeach site is now at https://yoteachapp.com/.  I revised the links above to reflect this.

Formative

Here we are on the eve of KySTE 2015, and what better way to celebrate than to share a new tool?

It's strange how the world works.  Infuse Learning is an assessment tool I've plugged in several of my PDs in the past.  Unfortunately, they recently sent out a mass email and wrote a blog entry informing its users that the site will close down permanently on April 3.   Although there were some beta and buggy issues that sometimes compromised the tool, it had a lot going for it, and it was hard to complain about its cost (free!).

But as one door closes, another one opens.  Usually when a company follows me on Twitter, I give its website a glance for 30 seconds and move on.  However, a few weeks back, the folks at Formative got my attention.  I looked at their site....and looked at it some more.  That led to a slew of emails and a Skype chat with Kevin McFarland (one of its creators), and here I have to give praise. McFarland has gone above and beyond answering my questions and demoing this new website with me.  He's a former educator with a passion for his product, and it shows.  Now, McFarland admits that Formative is just out of beta with some powerful upgrades still around the corner, but I have to be honest: even from playing with it as is, I can tell this will quickly become one of my favorite formative assessment tools.  Plus, it is completely free.

How does it work?  Formative is a Web 2.0 tool that is device-agnostic -- if you can get to the Internet you can use it.  Basically, a teacher can create formative assessments (Formative calls them "assignments," as a reminder that the site can be more than just a quizmaker) and students can take them one of two ways: either in a "open" way that requires no account or registration, or they can log in to begin a data trail tied to their name.  In a novel touch, when teachers create assessments, they are given either a "Quick Code" or a direct URL they can share with students that would technically work in either registered or unregistered mode.  This dual nature of Formative is powerful.  The open mode makes it easy for teachers to try it out with their class, and allows students to take assessments in seconds (much like the open systems of Nearpod's "sessions" or joining a Socrative "room number").  On the other hand, registered accounts will eventually allow student data to be collected and analyzed over time, something that is beyond the current capabilities of Nearpod and Socrative.  While on the subject of those two popular tools, Formative has obviously studied them and others in an attempt to bring the best options together in one product.

There are two types of assignments that a teacher can create: "build your own from scratch," or "upload & transform a document."

Build your own from scratch:  After deciding on your assignment title, you can either "Add a Question" or "Add Content."  For questions, you can choose a typed response, multiple choice, true or false, or "show your work," which is basically a whiteboard tool for students.  (This drawing function reminds me of one of my favorite aspects of Nearpod.)  For content, you can easily embed a YouTube video, or draw and share something you created on a whiteboard.  There is also a Rich Text Format editor as a content option, but I had issues successfully embedding code or making hyperlinks active; at the very least, this could function as an informational text box inside your assignment.  The RTF editor aside, the tools were easy to manipulate and edit.  In an upcoming upgrade, McFarland says you will even be able to tag questions with specific Core Content standards.  The eventual implications of this is enormous; for example, perhaps you could see how one student is handling a specific standard, or run a report of all the standards with how your class is doing with them.

Upload & transform a document:  This to me is one of the more awesome aspects of Formative.  We often talk of making a paperless classroom, but for many teachers like myself, we have reams of great assessments that either exist as paper versions only (you could scan it and make a PDF, but then what?) or are carefully crafted in an electronic document that doesn't easily lend itself to be reconfigured as a quiz.  How do you make the bridge? Formative has the easiest solution I've seen so far.

If you choose upload, you are confronted with a myriad of choices, as the picture below shows.

In Formative's upload tool, you can transform a website, access your Google Drive for docs, access Facebook (!) or even take a picture (!!), among several other options.

Once uploaded and transformed, Formative allows you to edit the assignment in various ways.  The most obvious is you can add "answer boxes" wherever you like in whatever size you like.  Answer types not only include text and multiple choice, but drawing and taking a picture!  (You also have a whiteout tool to "cover" part of your upload if necessary.)   You can delete pages you don't need and resize, delete or move any boxes after the fact.

After an uploaded assignment is saved, you can choose it from your Dashboard, go to Live Results, and edit the answer key for automatic grading of right and wrong answers.  I like how you can list multiple answers as correct ("30," "Thirty" and "thirty," for example).  The Dashboard will give the assessment's Quick Code or direct URL, and allow a teacher to see students' answers in real time.   The default grade value of each question is 10 points, which you can change.  As students answer, you can manually change the right/wrong answer grades as well as assess the qualitative responses, like drawing or text.   Here again, Formative has a unique tool with a red to green "slider" which can make the points go from zero to the maximum amount.  (According to McFarland, giving additional written feedback in this same slider area is a near-future upgrade.)  From the Dashboard, you can click "Export" and download an Excel spreadsheet that gives a simplified, but useful, report on all the students who have taken your assignment.

Clearly this student has not watched Star Wars.

Like any brand new tool, there are some quirks that you either need to be aware of to avoid or will hopefully be improved in future versions.  I already mentioned the RTF editor issues when creating an assignment from scratch.  When working with an uploaded document, I hit a few walls.  For example, if you add answer boxes to multiple pages and then decide to delete some of those pages, you will notice under Live Results that the "deleted" answer boxes are still there.  (Perhaps delete the answer boxes BEFORE deleting the pages.)  Multiple choice answer boxes create how many letters and number of choices you want (A, B, C...) but you can't actually add answers to each letter (A: blue, B: red....), so if the multiple choice selections aren't already on the uploaded document, you are probably better off with a text response.  Another annoyance is that if you add an answer box after the fact in the middle of two existing answer boxes, the number assigned is not in sequence but what would actually be the next number as if it is at the end.  For example, if after making an assignment with 36 answer boxes, you decide to go back and put an answer box between #7 and #8, it will number it #37.  Issues like these actually led to me deleting my uploaded assignment and starting over, so for now, plan your uploaded assignment creations carefully.  But these are quibbles.  I cannot stress enough how awesome it is that Formative can magically transform your existing documents into digital assignments; it's a game changer and by itself makes the site worthy of a try-out.


How could you use it?  As mentioned previously, Formative's strength is that it could do the best of both worlds.  If you want students to interact with digital assessments without registering, you can easily do so via its Quick Codes or public links (much like Nearpod or Socrative requires no student account to interact with its tools).  If you plan on using it often and want longitudinal data, students can create accounts and you can eventually analyze their answers over time.  And don't forget your ability to digitally convert existing documents, or even transforming a webpage or a picture into an interactive assessment.  Last but not least, a flipped/blended or differentiated classroom experience can be as easy as handing out Quick Codes. Simply put, Formative is one of the most user-friendly and powerful formative tools I've found.

Downsides?   You may have to wait a few more months for some more useful upgrades like tagging questions with Common Core standards and giving written feedback, but patience will be rewarded with this tool.  Mr. McFarland really cares about input from teachers that can improve the product, so this is a site that can only get better.  He also promised that the core product will always be free for teachers, and that's music to my ears.

Go now and get Formative!  If you are already a user or after you try it out, leave a Comment below and share your successes and challenges with the tool.