Formative: Collecting info in a different way

For many of us in education, we are often in search of new and fun ways to assess kids to see if the material we covered that day stuck.  There are several web 2.0 tools out there to do this, poll everywhere, todaysmeet, kahoot, but, I found another site that also can be used to collect data and information but, it is done a little bit differently than the other sites, as it allows interaction and doodling.  It's called Formative.

Formative is set up a little like Kahoot, where the teacher creates a panel of questions (or even just one question) and sends the kids a link to a question, survey, short answer response, etc.  It saves all of the questions within the site so you can reuse them year after year.  The site also establishes a data summary so you can check and see understanding.

One of the components I appreciated was the capability of making classes within the site.  I feel that is an awesome aspect of the site.  It can help aggregate data even better by comparing classes to each other, gauging needs of different levels.  I can help a teacher do differentiation.

I decided to try the site out with my yearbook staff.   I added a photo of a student at the fair and ask the students to caption the photo.  They received 5 points for doing so.  I think I am going to start doing this for a daily starter.  There are hundreds of yearbook photos out there.  If they caption them together, we can get several done with good captions!