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1. Getting Started with Assessment for Learning

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1. Getting Started with Assessment for Learning

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'Assessment for learning (AFL) is an approach to teaching and learning that creates feedback which is then used to improve students’ performance. Students become more involved in the learning process and from this gain confidence in what they are expected to learn and to what standard.

AFL involves students becoming more active in their learning and starting to ‘think like a teacher’. They think more actively about where they are now, where they are going and how to get there.'

Click the image above to access the short article.

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Effective Assessment for Learning has been evidenced to be one of the top ten impactful teaching practices for learner engagement and outcomes.

But what does it look like in practice?

This 5 minute videos provides a quick summary.

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Happens regularly throughout class

A monitoring activity to immediately inform the teacher and the learner of what they know and what they don't know yet

Low stakes

Quick snapshots

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Happens at the end of a topic or unit

To evaluate learning and provide a grade against a benchmark

Often high stakes

E.g. exams, final projects, recitals, presentations, portfolio submission

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7. 10 Active Google Meet Activities for your Classroom

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7. 10 Active Google Meet Activities for your Classroom

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Coming up with new ideas to keep your students engaged, and check their understanding remotely, during Google Meet calls is hard.

While I don’t have a magic wand to make things better, these 10 Google Meet activities can add a little spark of interest to your class, and gather valuable information at the same time!

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The excitement over virtual learning wore off a long time ago.

Coming up with new ideas to keep your students engaged during Google Meet calls is hard.

While I don't have a magic wand to make things better, these 10 Google Meet activities can add a little spark of interest to your class.
Note: activities marked with an * require the enterprise edition of Google Meet which includes breakout rooms, polling, and Q&A. For more information on G Suite for Education enterprise, check out this post.

1. Student of the Meet

The first Google Meet activity I would like to share is based on something my wife and I do with our five kids.

Every summer we do "kid of the day."

The kid of the day gets to:

Go first for whatever activities we do that day.

Make choices for the family (what movie to watch, what dessert to have, etc)

Pray during dinner

Stay up 30 min past their bedtime and do an activity with mom or dad.

You can modify our family tradition to become "student of the meet"
Here are some ideas:

Let them help you with your morning meeting.

Have them play two truths and a lie with you at the beginning of the meeting.

Let them pick the virtual background everyone has to use for the session.

Have them select the review game for the day

Let them pick the discussion prompt or exit ticket question.

Allow them to select who they want in their breakout group.

💡 Tip: Use your cell phone to access the random student selector in Google Classroom to keep track of who you have called on. It requires zero effort on your part and it works wonderfully!

2. Play a simple game
One thing that I have learned about teaching remotely is to never start on time.
There is always a group of students who join 10 minutes late and will end up disrupting the flow of your lesson.

Instead, I plan a fun Google Meet activity to serve as a sponge to engage students for the first 5-10 minutes of the call.

Start your virtual meeting by challenging students to a classic game of Connect 4, Battleship, or Scrabble, all of which have been re-designed inside Google Slides, making them ideal for a class competition.

💡 Connect Four is quick and can be played in 10 minutes or less.

Battleship and Scrabble take a while longer and may require several class periods to finish.

Make a copy of these templates to get started:

Suggestion: Winner gets to pick the losers Meet background. 😂

If you want to keep things educational, here are some more academic ideas:

3. "Would you rather" polls*

These polls serve as a sponge activity and help you engage every student in your class. You can chat about the results while you are taking attendance and organizing your breakout rooms and lesson resources.
Note: Polling is only available for the enterprise edition of G Suite for Education. You can easily create polls using Google Forms or Google Classroom which you can link to Google Meet through the chat.
Your poll questions don't need to be related to your lesson, it's just a fun way to break the ice and welcome everyone to the class.

If you teach young students, use emoji to provide context clues about each of the options. I recommend using this Chrome extension .

4. Put a hand up

This is one of my favorite Google Meet activities. It's simple and fun!

Note: this is a variation of a popular TikTok meme "put a finger down" which your students will probably recognize, instantly making you the cool teacher for the day.

First, you need a list of yes / no questions to ask your students.

Start with some non-academic questions to warm up your class:

Put a hand up if you have ever made a TikTok dance.

Put a hand up if you think that peanut M&Ms are better than plain.

Put a hand up if you listen to Christmas music all year long.

Students answer "yes" by using the hand-raise feature of Google Meet (this feature is available in all versions of Google Meet and works well on iPads and mobile devices).

Everyone will be able to see the raised hands.
Tip: the meeting host can see who raised their hand first (top of the attendee list)
If you have time, ask the first person who raised their hand to comment on their answer. The goal here is to keep things light and fun.
Next, ask some questions that tie in to your lesson for the day:

Put a hand up if you have ever looked at a cell under a microscope.

Put a hand up if you have ever watched a movie about the civil rights movement.

Put a hand up if you have ever watched a movie based off of a Shakespeare play.

These non-threatening questions engage students and help them access prior knowledge, introducing your lesson for the day.

5. Jam with your class

You CAN use Jamboard with all of your students, but you need to carefully design your activity to make sure things don't get out of hand.

🆕 you can now upload a custom background to a Jamboard frame!

At this time, Jamboard doesn't offer revision history or the ability to lock things on the screen, so whole-group activities need to be simple and well organized.

My two favorite whole-class Jamboard activities are line attack and sticky graph. These two activities work on all types of devices with all ages of students.

If you are interested in learning more about using Jamboard with your class, check out this post.

6. Learning Pictionary

Jamboard is good for whole-class and small group collaboration, but what if you want every student to draw and doodle on their own?

This type of activity will engage both the left and right sides of the brain, leading to better retention.

How can you use Whiteboard.fi in your classroom?

Call out a math problem and ask students to create a rough graph.

Practice spelling

Call out a learning target and give students 30 seconds to create a doodle.

Say a word or sentence in Spanish and ask students to illustrate what they heard

The teacher controls available through Whiteboard.fi allow you to see every drawing in the class. You can even select and share an example with the rest of the class if you wish.
Note: Whiteboard.chat is very similar to Whiteboard.fi. Everyone seems to have their favorite. Check them both out and pick the one you like best!

7. Escape the breakout room*

For the next Google Meet activity, you are going to "lock" your students in a breakout room and see who can escape first!

Students love escape room activities in the physical classroom and they will enjoy the digital version as well!

💡 You can set a timer for breakout rooms. The timer helps students stay focused and sets a clear end-point for the activity.

Not only are escape room activities fun, they teach critical thinking and problem solving.

The ready-made activities from BreakoutEDU work really well (free and paid), or you can design your own activity using Google Forms.
Google Meet escape room activities:
8. Learning stations with Google Slides*

Escape rooms aren't the only group Google Meet activity.

You can also use breakout rooms to replicate learning stations like you you might use in your traditional classroom.

Learning stations help break up a long class period into manageable 10-15 minute blocks.

In order for this to work, you need a digital space to organize your stations.

Google Slides works really well for this Google Meet activity.
I created this group project slide deck to facilitate independent work for up to 9 groups.
Before class, I add directions and resources to each group's slide. They can use the slide to share a summary of their work and can add links to Jam files or anything else they created as a group. I can pre-populate each group's slide with the group members, task and instructions.

Here are some quick ideas for how you could use this idea in various subject areas:

ELA: Assign groups to do a biography of a different character in the book you are reading.

Social Studies: Assign groups to document the key contributions of a historical figure.

Elementary: Letter showcase

Science: Assign groups to summarize an element from the periodic table.

World Language: Assign groups to define and provide examples for vocabulary words

Math: Assign groups to document the steps required to solve a problem

Review: Assign each group an objective from your study guide.

9. Link to a Google Classroom activity

We just talked about small group work, but what about independent work?
Is it possible to give every student in Google Meet their own individual assignment?
Yes....using Google Classroom!

Every assignment in Google classroom has a unique URL which you can use to post in the Google Meet chat to help students navigate to the correct assignment.

💡 Tip: Introducing an assignment during a live session will help minimize confusion about where assignments are located and when they are due.

To learn more about linking to a Classroom assignment through Google Meet, check out the video below.

10. Exit Ticket Q&A*

I'm a big fan of exit tickets at the end of a lesson.

Asking students to reflect on their learning give you valuable feedback and improves retention.

Unfortunately, reflections posted in the chat are messy and difficult to read after the session ends.

I recently discovered that you can use the Q&A feature (enterprise only) for exit tickets.

This is typically the last Google Meet activity that I assign to my students.

When students use the Q&A to share their reflection, everyone can see a nice, orderly list of responses that don't clog up the chat.

The meeting host can hide any inappropriate responses.
At the end of the meeting, the meeting host will receive a nicely formatted spreadsheet listing all of the student responses.
You can take your time reviewing the responses to plan your next lesson or assign participation grades based on the responses that were submitted.

What's working in your classroom?

Remote teaching is really hard.

I know you are doing your best to challenge and support your students during this pandemic.
Did you have success using one of my Google Meet activities in your classroom?
I would love to know!

If you have other ideas that are working in your classroom, drop me a comment and let me know what is working for you!

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10 ways to make virtual lessons more interesting

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The excitement over virtual learning wore off a long time ago. Coming up with new ideas to keep your students engaged during Google Meet calls is hard. While I don't have a magic wand to make things better, these 10 Google Meet activities can add a little spark of interest to your class.

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In Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, he stresses the vital importance of Checking for Understanding. Tom Sherrington outlines his favourite 'cold calling' questioning strategies to achieve this in the short blog post above.

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In Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, he stresses the vital importance of Checking for Understanding. I explore this in some detail in this post: Check for Understanding... why it matters and how to do it. In Volume 1 of Walkthrus we cover the general method, emphasising the need to ask students what they've understood, not if they've understood, engaging two or more of them in short probing dialogues.

However, it always pays to re-read Rosenshine's paper, beyond the headings. In the detail, he suggests several other specific ways that effective teachers were found to check for understanding. Developing this repertoire of methods for different situations, switching between them in planned and spontaneous moments, can make teaching highly responsive, adapting to the feedback students are giving through their responses. This works particularly well in conjunction with Cold Calling, so that all students form stronger habits around focusing their attention, in readiness to share their understanding if and when they're asked.

Here are five ways:

Summarise the story so far:

Whether reading a story or text or giving an explanation of any kind, stop at key moments to ask a student to summarise what they've understood so far. This prevents you from the delusion that it's all somehow just 'going in'. You stop to check! Also, summarising is a good thinking process for the students who are asked.

Ok let's stop there. Yousef, summarise the scene for us. What's been happening?

Right, so that's what the historian's analysis was. Amy, could you summarise the key points of her argument?

So, that's how a valley is formed. Let's try to summarise the main steps? ...Jenny, have a go.

Repeat instructions

This seems so obvious but it's not absolutely routine for everyone and it makes a big difference - saving time compared to having to interrupt and redirect confused students later on. Whenever you've given instructions for a task, an activity, some homework.... get a couple of people to repeat them back to you to check that they understood the details:

So, that's the homework everyone. Robert, let me check.. what do you think I've asked everyone to do?

Before you all get going, Taylor, run through the procedure for me. What do you have to do?.

Agree or disagree

This has two useful applications. One is to help students to form their own opinions - allowing them scope to agree or disagree. The other is as a way to secure attention when other students are talking - a soft check for listening and engagement as well as for understanding. Embedded in this is the follow-on 'and why?' Students should give their reasons.

Michael has made a really interesting point there..... Samantha, do you agree or disagree with him? (She has to have been listening to answer). Ok. Why do you think that?

Looking at those statements, I would say two are true and one is false.... Do you agree or disagree.... Ashley? And why is that?

Think aloud as you plan

This takes time to embed as a normal routine - because students are largely used to thinking privately - in the hidden way we all do. Promoting metacognitive talk is a powerful approach in general and normalising 'thinking aloud' can help to explore students' thought processes as they work out how they'll approach a task. It's a great check for understanding:

Let's look at the problem. It's not a simple one-step process. Aleisha, talk it through for me. How would you go about solving it?

Before we crack on with the composition, let's plan what we're going to do. ...OK, Toni, let's hear your thoughts. Talk through your ideas for the piece and how you'll organise them.

Explain or defend your position

When student express opinions or give an analysis, it's helpful to check that they understand the underlying concepts rather than having learned stock responses without a supporting schema. So, when students make an initial response, probe further, asking them to explain key points or to defend their position, perhaps with a counterargument as a reference:

Most of you have selected answer A. Joseph, why did you pick A? Why not B?

Interesting Anwar. The rate is increasing more gradually but why would that be?

35%? Are you sure Michael?

That's one way to say it Daisy but is it the best way?

Here's 10 minute Kitchen Pedagogy video exploring these ideas...

David Goodwin's superb one-page summary of this post is here. Download it below.

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Five Ways. A series of short posts summarising some everyday classroom practices. In Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, he stresses the vital importance of Checking for Understanding. I explore this in some detail in this post: Check for Understanding... why it matters and how to do it.

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This short video outlines how Kahoot! can be maximized for formative assessment, and learn how to best utilise reports to track student progress.

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Kahoot! for formative assessment - Kahoot! for schools Unconference

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4. Assessment for Learning, or formative assessment, refers to any checking of learning activity that is used to guide teaching.

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4. Assessment for Learning, or formative assessment, refers to any checking of learning activity that is used to guide teaching.

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Education is a conversation, and assessment for learning allows learners to contribute. They can demonstrate what they know  and what they need further support with, allowing us as educators to make appropriate decisions about what happens next.

We hope the tools and resources below will be of value to your practice.

Please reach out with any questions, or to share any fantastic resources you've come across yourself. We would love to share them!

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This is a space to share your thoughts.

Are you already using some of these?

Have any of the posts inspired fresh thinking or presented strategies you would like to try?

Do you have other checking learning tips that are working well in your current practice and you would like to share?

Please let us know below!