Week three of lockdown has now finished and I am 50 live lessons in. We currently run a four week timetable so one more week to finish off my full teaching load. So what developments to my practice have I been working on this week? Using MS Forms for student assessments.
Using MS Forms to assess students work.
Over the last week I have been experimenting with the best way to assess students in the online environment, particularly as we have exams coming up that need to be delivered online. I started by using just a simple Word document with the exam question written at the top and shared this with students via Teams as an assignment. However, this method seemed to bring about lots of issues for students doing the work on their phones, or on Ipads.
When I posted a Year 9 exam in Word and asked students to edit the document with their answers, again there were issues – and I think with was part down to my expectation that students are comfortable with editing Word documents – this is not always the case – is it something we teach in school?
So to focus the students on the answers rather than the formating – I moved to Forms. This gives students a directed place to input their answers without the need to worry about formatting which can be a distraction.
Setting up the form – reducing marking load.
My first effort was a simple 6 mark question for my GCSE group. There was space to write and that was about it.
I set up the number of points for the question in the Form and then sent it to the students via the Assignment option – I just clicked on Assignment, from existing and then found the form in my list. I could also post the share link in the meeting chat if needed.
Students have said that they found this easier to fill in on their Ipads and phones, so that is good news.
Feedback time.
Time to feedback and I found this a quick process. I can bring up a student’s answer at a time and then see how long the student has taken to complete the answer. This is helpful – and perhaps might highlight the copy and paste students 🙂
To provide feedback, just click on the points box next to the question and type in the number and then for this question I provided feedback by clicking on the “?” box at the top and then wrote my feedback here. This box is designed for an overall comment of all of the work, and each question itself has a “?” box for feedback on each question if there is more than one. Once done, you just click on the > next to the student name (I have blanked the name out) to move onto the next student.
This is a teacher marked question so I then started to explore auto marked questions as well.
Moving forward – using different types of question
I started to think about using multiple-choice questions to assess students, and clearly, the key here is the quality of the question and the range of answers – too obvious and it makes the question meaningless really.
I then started to think about saving time by providing feedback to the students for each question, so that if they get the auto marked question wrong, they will know why…. This is just a case of clicking on the “question bubble” next to the answer choice and then adding your feedback.
Whole class diagnostics
When a test that has multiple types of questions has been completed you can get a class diagnostic page which is really helpful for future planning. An example is shown below. Clicking on more details gives you a breakdown telling you which students got it right or wrong.
Week four of lockdown coming up, and the second online parents evening. I miss the buzz of the classroom!
Geographical reflections 