Curating Resources #2 - Formative
- hodginsjustin
- Sep 28, 2017
- 2 min read
For this week's resource, we were asked to find a tool that helps facilitate assessments of learning. For this purpose, I have selected a website called Formative, (https://goformative.com/) which focuses provides an online tool to help both students and teachers organize their progress towards completing both the class and curriculum goals.
Formative offers multiple ways of setting up lessons and assessments (labelled as "formatives" within the site), allowing teachers to pose essay questions, drawing questions, "show your work" style questions, or something as simple as a multiple choice question. In addition to such, teachers are allowed and encouraged to "tag" their questions in line with different curriculum expectations so that the teacher is allowed to track the students' successes in line with the expectations they hoped to cover. As the formative questions and assignments are set up by the teacher and the students are "invited" by the teacher, the teacher can see the demographics of their classroom should they require it. Finally, teachers are allowed to provide live feedback and further questioning to the students, should it be necessary.
One of the major drawbacks I've found with using Formative here in Canada is that it is largely an American website; attempting to sign up with any Canadian school yields an error! However, this feature is not required to make Formative function, and as such only limits the site's ability to index the classes as a part of the school. This does pose a problem when searching the database for curriculum criteria as well, as the program only comes default with the Grade 7 & 8 Math curriculum, meaning that a little time must be spent to upload the criteria oneself. One of the other issues, as is pretty evident with any web/technology-based program, is that use of Formative assumes that the students have functioning technology with internet access, thus limiting the access that lower-income students have to the formatives that you make. However, it should still be noted that Formative can be accessed by phone, tablet, or by computer, anytime.
To finish off, I'll leave you with a video (humorously) explaining how to use Formative, made by the Formative staff.
