Assessment Technology Project:

Forms

Forms are my preferred medium of assessment because they easily interface with Classroom. They're easy to differentiate, and they offer a plethora of differentiation-specific tech tools. They're also free, shareable, printable, endlessly replicable and they do a decent number of diagnostics by themselves. As of right now, they're the gold standard in assessment technology.

**Forms are the only tool here that a real teacher would ever use to differentiate. Peardeck, Plicker, and Kahoot! are all whole-group software.

Plicker

Plicker is useful for a low-stress, anonymous (as I use it, you can collect scores if you want,) and immediate feedback tool to check for understanding during a lecture, movie, or, if you're creative, during a  particularly challenging group-work assignment. It also requires no technology but your own smart phone and free-to-print student cards. It's the technology that isn't really technology.

Peardeck

Peardeck blew me away the first time I saw it. (I learned about it through a student in EDU 276.) It is an immensely engaging software with a variety of tools that allow the teacher to customize an assessment on the fly based on real-time student input. It is not ideal for formal assessments as collecting individual results is spotty at best.

Kahoot!

Kahoot! is the epitome of gamified assessment software. Students choose their own name. "FartButt6969" is likely to show up on your projector. I've also found that it rewards students with naturally quick synapses while condemning processing time. That being said, it is widely used in classrooms, and as such, I would be remiss to leave it out as an option for our digital assessment assignment.​

Digital Field Trip Software

Slides

Slides is the presentation software I strongly recommend using for this project. It has many of the same features as PowerPoint. It's interface is familiar,  you can save it in "presentation" mode so that viewers aren't encumbered by tools to which they don't have access. Possibly most importantly, it is "light." Publishing it online means that viewers don't need to download anything to interact with your field trip. It lives online and you're just viewing it. In a world in which your class content needs to compete for mobile data against cat videos, YouTube binges, and Pandora, it's best when no one needs to click a "download, 4.3 mb?" prompt.

Prezi

Prezi is an amazing presentation software for a digital field trip. In fact, I think it is the BEST presentation software for a digital field trip. The different, tiered levels you can create and the cascading, unpredictable effect of "how much can I see if I click..." mimics the reality of investigating cities on foreign continents. That being said, the interface is not user friendly, and the unpredictable effect that makes user exploration so fun makes field trip creation incredibly difficult. That being said, the final results are breathtakingly streamlined and user friendly.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is an incredibly powerful interface for connecting an audience with material. They've been at it the longest as well. That being said, all that power, and all those features come with feature bloat, and a whole lot of file size. Chances are, if you use PowerPoint to create your digital field trip, it will exceed the 10mb limit of Google Classroom and OnCourse. Large file sizes means slow load time at best. Being that PowerPoint isn't hosted online without a license, it means that only other people with your version of PowerPoint can download and see your file. To the light, web-based educator, PowerPoint's downfalls far outweigh it's advantages.

I didn't forget to link this icon or the title to the right. PowerPoint is not web-based, and as such there is no website to which I can direct you.

Lesson Plan Software

Google Classroom

I'd strongly recommend publishing your lesson on your very own Google Classroom. It makes it very easy to get every student their own copy of their own assignment, it makes collecting assignments and projecting student exemplars a breeze. Short of publishing your own website, Google Classroom is the best way to get all the digital materials you create to the students in our class.

WordSift

WordSift is a great way to create word clouds. It also has some really amazing features, like connecting a vocabulary word in a web with other, interconnected words. There are a bunch of cool uses for Wordsift. Get creative with it!

Quizlet

Quizlet is a software that helps students to study and learn vocabulary. There are some cool, competitive features, flashcards, and other questioning options. It is very popular in schools with both teachers and students alike.

Ed Puzzle

Ed Puzzle allows you to embed questions within a video. Basically, students put on headphones and watch a video on their own, individual computer, and at certain, designated points, the video stops and students are prompted to answer one of a variety of questions. It's a great way to "chunk" a video and also an effective way to build in accountability.

Text Complexity Analyzer

There are countless applications for a good text complexity analyzer. It helps students self monitor their progress. You can use it as a modified "ticket out the door" measure. You can run class-wide, or small-group competitions to see which group out writes all the rest.

Web-Design Software

Weebly - Recommended

Weebly is the software I use to host my website. It is easy to use and intuitive, and the free version produces genuinely useable hyperlinks. While I am well versed in Sites, I live on Weebly.com, and spend every spare minute there refining my digital workspace. I can easily afford to remove the "powered by Weebly" from the footer of my website but choose not to because I genuinely endorse their web-design software.

Google Sites - Good

Google, which hosts 99.9% of my digital life, makes a perfectly good web-design software called Sites. (Make sure to choose "New" Sites, not "Classic," when starting off.) It is not my recommended software because the link to a free site ends up being something like: www.sites.google.com/125gFtybz/karpie. They're just incomprehensible and barring an existing hyperlink, or paying for a domain, they will never get an actual human to type them in. Also, the software limits font and color choices, and I find the software a little difficult to navigate when it comes to sections and columns. For avid Google users such as myself, the interface is familiar and comforting, but the weird discord between finding your site in "Sites" or "Drive," but never both, or either is off-putting as well for new users.