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Friday, May 22, 2015

Quick Formative Assessment App

Plickers is a free app that allows you to create your own question sets and easily poll an entire group of students while they use QR codes to select an answer.  I was super excited when I first heard about this free technology, but I also questioned whether or not primary students would be able to easily respond correctly with the QR codes.  I was surprised by my second graders when they quickly understood how to use this technology and how excited they were to use Plickers.  After the first session, they continue to ask every day if we could use the Plickers.  I used Plickers as a warm-up or a closure to math lessons.  Within five minutes, I quickly assessed math concepts that informed the lesson for the next day.  I thought the initial excitement would fade, but after a few months of occasional use, students were still excited to use Plickers.  Active engagement of learning is unavoidable when you use Plickers as each student is accountable for responding to every question.  There is no daydreaming allowed.

Recently, Plickers added the option to upload images to use as part of the question.  Below is an example of how I used images with Plickers.

Plickers archives questions along with student responses under the report tab.  Items are stored chronologically and filtered by class.


Each question that you create is stored under the library tab.  My only wish is that I would be able to organize the questions into folders.  I emailed this request to Plicker and they replied that they are currently working on this feature as they have heard from many other about this same request.  It is great to know that they are open to suggestions and are trying to create a very useful tool.

All of my second grade students are so familiar with using Plickers that they could create their own questions.  Next year, I will plan to continue to use Plickers and allow more opportunities for students to be the teacher.  This could become part of a daily routine as students create a question of the day.  Most students love the opportunity to be the teacher and Plickers makes it easy.

Plickers App



Visit plickers.com to learn more.






This photo is posted on the Plickers website.  When I was cutting out the codes, I just cut them in half as they print two codes to each page.  After thinking about this, I cut the codes into squares because I really want students to respond based on their own thoughts, not other classmates.  If codes are printed on rectangle paper, students may start to look around the room before they respond.  In my opinion, the best think about this technology is the anonymity and I believe this photo is just an oversight by Plickers.



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