How Digital Assessment Tools Help Teachers Deliver Better Learning Experiences
Online educational technologies are gaining speed year by year. Students get more and more convenient with them, and paper testing is losing its importance and necessity when we talk about knowledge evaluation. Learning Management Systems and feedback tools - these digital instruments are aimed to provide students with fast and fair assessments directly after taking a test.
Why Are Digital Assessment Better Than Paper Testing?
There are lots of reasons to use educational technologies for student assessments, such as saving time, making the learning process more comprehensive and friendly, offering fast feedback, etc. For example, the Unicheck Plagiarism Checker Add-on for Google Docs allows students to not just avoid accidental or intentional plagiarising, but also check their citations and references. The students can precheck their assignments before submitting them, which saves their teachers' time for the actual grading. Also, no more stacks of papers on the table, no more lost tests, no more need of taking all assignments home.
Digital assessment tools ease the lives of both teachers and learners: Due to modern technologies, students can get answers to their questions without needing to interrupt each other. All their activity can be tracked by a teacher on the spot.
Finally, digital testing is fun for students, which creates a better learning environment: Working with an interested audience makes teaching easier and more desirable for learners.
4 Ways Of Using Digital Assessment Tools
1. Gamifying The Answers
One of the most popular tools for digital assessments is Kahoot! This gamification platform helps teachers build the learning process in a form of a game by creating multiple choice questions or using already existing games. The teacher can upload media files and images to create a unique game, or download ready-made stuff. Though every student needs to work on their personal computer to pass the test, this is a great group activity, as all questions are shown on a shared screen and may be discussed if needed. According to the feedback from US teachers, Kahoot! provides 100% engagement in the class, as students totally plunge into the competitive atmosphere wanting to win.
The ideal solution to get a brief and to-the-point feedback from a group of learners is AnswerGarden. This simple online tool is focused on the (quick) question-answer interaction between learners and their teacher. After the teacher has shared a question in the class, students can either start forming an answer or choose the right one from a multiple choice provided by the teacher. The speed of collecting data is really impressive in AnswerGarden, but unfortunately it has limited online time. Therefore, this tool is not suitable for all types of questions: Teachers should avoid too long questions, as they demand even longer answers.
2. Giving Instant Feedback
A great tool for free stuff lovers is Socrative. This software is equipped with various features that can be used by educators for many different purposes. It also includes activities like quizzes, quick questions, exit tickets, etc. Socrative has an intuitive colorful and easy interface and apps for both students and teachers. The tool allows educators to get immediate insight into their student understanding in real-time, as they can create quizzes in seconds and also share them with other teachers.
3. Tracking Progress
Plickers is another real-time educational software allowing to get data for an assessment. It is a comprehensive tool that helps teachers understand exactly where their students are in terms of progress. Though Plickers is a serious tool for digital assessing, many students consider it to be a fun game, what makes the studying process even easier. The results may be seen in two modes: Students mode and Graph mode. The Graph mode allows a teacher to explore how learners make their decisions, while the Students mode helps learners track their correct and incorrect answers.
4. Creating Survey-Based Assessments
A widely-used tool for student assessments is Google Forms. Google Forms allows teachers to create multiple choice questions in the form of a survey and enhance it with images and videos in a few minutes. They can also add collaborators to their Google Forms and work on a survey together.
To Sum Up
There are many digital assessment tools that serve different purposes in the educational environment. Teachers will find them useful, as these tools will help them track their students' progress and provide them with more objective feedback and grades.
