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There is no shortage of formative assessment strategies, techniques, and tools available to teachers who use formative instructional practice in their classrooms. Here is an extensive list of 75 digital tools, apps, and platforms that can help you and your students use formative assessment to elicit evidence of learning. We didn't just add any old tool to this list. Here are the criteria we used for those that made the cut:

Supports formative instructional strategies and ways to activate learners to be resources for themselves and peers

Is free or awful close to it (under $10 per year, where possible)

Allows both students and teachers to take the activator role when possible (sometimes teachers need to get things started)

Before you dig into the tools, I encourage you to spend some time thinking about exactly what you want to accomplish with your students. "How to pick the right digital tool: Start with your learning goal" by Erin Beard can help you wrap your head around goals and guide you in choosing the best tool for the task. "27 easy formative assessment strategies for gathering evidence of student learning" can help you decide what strategies work best for you and your students.

Record audio and video

Create quizzes, polls, and surveys

1. Crowdsignal Lets you create online polls, quizzes, and questions. Students can use smartphones, tablets, and computers to provide their answers, and information can be culled for reports.

2. Edulastic Allows you to make standards-aligned assessments and get instant feedback.

3. FreeOnlineSurveys Helps you create surveys, quizzes, forms, and polls.

4. Gimkit Lets you write real-time quizzes. And it was designed by a high school student!

5. Kahoot! A game-based classroom response system that lets you create quizzes using internet content.

6. MicroPoll Helps you create polls, embed them into websites, and analyze responses.

7. Naiku Lets you write quizzes students can answer using their mobile devices.

8. Obsurvey Designed to make surveys, polls, and questionnaires.

9. Poll Everywhere Lets you create a feedback poll or ask questions and see results in real time. Allows students to respond in various ways. With open-ended questions, you can capture data and spin up tag clouds to aggregate responses.

10. Poll Maker Offers unique features, like allowing multiple answers to one question.

11. ProProfs Helps you make quizzes, polls, and surveys.

12. Quia Lets you create games, quizzes, surveys, and more. Access a database of existing quizzes from other educators.

13. Quizalize Helps you create quizzes and homework.

14. Quizizz Guides you through designing quizzes and lets you include students in the quiz-writing process.

15. Quizlet Lets you make flashcards, tests, quizzes, and study games that are mobile friendly.

16. Survey Hero Designed to build questionnaires and surveys.

17. SurveyMonkey Helpful for online polls and surveys.

18. SurveyPlanet Also helpful for online polls and surveys.

19. Triventy Lets you create quizzes students take in real time using individual devices.

20. Yacapaca Helps you write and assign quizzes.

21. Zoho Survey Allows you to make mobile-friendly surveys and see results in real time.

Brainstorm, mind map, and collaborate

Present, engage, and inspire

Generate word or tag clouds

1. EdWordle Generates word clouds from any entered text to help aggregate responses and facilitate discussion. Word clouds are pictures composed of a cloud of smaller words that form a clue to the topic.

2. Tagxedo Allows you to examine student consensus and facilitate dialogues.

3. Wordables Helps you elicit evidence of learning or determine background knowledge about a topic.

4. WordArt Includes a feature that allows the user to make each word an active link to connect to websites, including YouTube.

Get real-time feedback

Foster family communication

1. Remind Lets you text students and stay in touch with families.

2. Seesaw Helps you improve family communication and makes formative assessment easy, while students can use the platform to document their learning.

3. Voxer Lets you send recordings so families can hear how their students are doing, students can chat about their work, and you can provide feedback.

Strengthen teacher-to-student or student-to-student communication

Keep the conversation going with live chats

1. Backchannel Chat A teacher-moderated version of Twitter.

2. Chatzy Supports live, online chats in a private setting.

Create and store documents or assignments

1. Google Forms A Google Drive app that allows you to create documents students can collaborate on in real time using smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

2. Piazza Lets you upload lectures, assignments, and homework; pose and respond to student questions; and poll students about class content. This tool is better suited for older students as it mimics post-secondary class instructional formats.

Learn more

There are several resources for learning more about formative assessment and responsive instruction strategies. Consider our formative practices workshops, where school and district teams can gain a better understanding of the role formative practice plays in instruction and the four foundational practices to use in the classroom. Or for a quick start, download our eBook "Making it work: How formative assessment can supercharge your practice."

Jump in, try new tools and methods, and have fun!

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75 digital tools and apps teachers can use to support formative assessment in the classroom

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There is no shortage of formative assessment strategies, techniques, and tools available to teachers who use formative instructional practice in their classrooms. Here is an extensive list of 75 digital tools, apps, and platforms that can help you and your students use formative assessment to elicit evidence of learning.

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Formative assessment is an important part of effective instruction. Teachers can use observations, checklists, and quick quizzes to gather data that will inform their instruction. Formative assessment identifies areas where students are excelling and struggling so that teachers can best alter their instruction to meet the needs of all students. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to work with a school looking to strengthen its formative assessment data collection by leveraging the power of tech-friendly tools.

Technology can make formative assessment a seamless part of everyday activities. Online tools and mobile devices can help teachers stay organized when collecting data that will make analyzing information easier and more meaningful. Formative assessment can take place throughout a unit of study during daily lessons that incorporate technology. As you examine the systems that work for you in your classroom, technology tools can make this process easier and seamless when used effectively.

Choosing the Right Tool

With the abundance of technology options available for teachers, it can be intimidating to search for and locate the right one. The correct choice for you, your students, and your school will depend on a variety of factors. One important thing to consider is when you plan to collect formative data. You may decide to embed questions into a lesson presentation using a BYOD-friendly tool like Nearpod, or to pause the whole class while taking a read of the room with a polling website like Kahoot!

When choosing the right tool, you will also want to take into account the age and ability of your students. Elementary students can "show what they know" at the end of a lesson when you capture and annotate their work using an app like Seesaw. Older students might answer quiz questions or post a short response on Schoology at the end of a class period. The goal for this type of formative assessment would be to gauge student understanding at the end of the lesson. The technology tool that you choose will depend on your goal as well as characteristics of your classroom, such as workflow and student composition.

Gathering Formative Assessment Data

Tech-friendly tools can make data collection seamless during classroom instruction. The embedded tools mentioned above can be integrated into lessons so that a quiz or poll can provide teachers with immediate feedback. They can then shift the direction of their lesson to address misconceptions or student questions. Formative assessment data gathered by teachers at the end of a lesson can also benefit from the ease of tech-friendly tools. Teachers can provide a few minutes for their quiz questions posted on Socrative or an exit slip to be completed on The Answer Pad.

Formative assessment data is often collected on checklists attached to clipboards or sheets of paper in a binder. There are also tech-friendly solutions for gathering formative assessment data that leverages the portability of mobile devices and the ability to enter data easily. Google Forms are one of my favorite formative assessment tools because they are completely customizable. Teachers can quickly create a data-entry form for a whole-class checklist, or individual and small-group conference notes. All of this collected data is automatically organized in a Google Spreadsheet, making it easy to keep track of student performance.

Planning With a Purpose

Once formative data has been collected, teachers can plan with a purpose. The tools mentioned above (including Kahoot!, Socrative, and Nearpod) organize student responses to questions for item analysis and review after a class period. Teachers can use this information to plan their next lesson and make decisions for individual students.

It may become clear, based on formative assessment data, that an entire class has misconceptions on a topic or has already mastered course content. Teachers might also find patterns in the data that can help them make decisions on how to address individual needs or how to group students. In addition to data collected on Google Forms, tech-friendly tools like Explain Everything -- which lets students record their voices and explain their thinking -- can go beyond just submitting a correct answer to help teachers figure out where students need help.

As you begin to develop a strategy for gathering and utilizing formative assessment data in your classroom, take a moment to think about how technology can support this work. Locating the right tool, building data collection into your routine, and making a plan based on student understanding are important steps to follow. Technology tools can elevate these best practices and make it easier to stay organized as you collect formative assessment data.

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Empowering Teachers With Tech-Friendly Formative Assessment Tools | Edutopia

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Formative assessment is an important part of effective instruction. Teachers can use observations, checklists, and quick quizzes to gather data that will inform their instruction. Formative assessment identifies areas where students are excelling and struggling so that teachers can best alter their instruction to meet the needs of all students.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Pre-assessment, formative assessment, and summative assessment can all benefit from a little technology!-- Created using PowToon -- Free sign up at http://www.powtoon.com/join -- Create animated videos and animated presentations for free.

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Technology Tools for Formative Assessments Video