Digital Assessment Tools Plickers/ Socrative/ Nearpod/ Seesaw

Abstract

Worldwide pandemic has completely changed the way we teach and interact with our students. Online educational technologies have gained speed. 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.

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. The assessment does not just happen after an online course or module or unit. It can (and should) happen before the learning, during the learning, and after the learning. Assessment has a triple function—it is diagnostic, formative, and summative—that help us assess where students are before, during, and after the learning. Formative assessment refers to a wide variety of methods that teachers use to conduct in-process evaluations of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a lesson, unit, or course. Summative assessment is an evaluation of student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. Assessments should really be about measuring learning outcomes. And learning outcomes should be about students demonstrating what they know, and more importantly, what they can do (their skills). Learning outcomes can be low-level (recalling information) or high level (analyzing information). There are numerous tools of conducting digital assessment, but we are going to present just a few, namely: Seesaw.com, Plickers.com, Socrative.com, and Nearpod.com. Teachers will find them useful, as these tools will help them track their students‘ progress and provide them with more objective feedback and grades.