Tuesday 30 October 2012

Assessment for learning - Diagramming, Drawing, Sketching

Plenty of student response systems exist now that support assessment for learning either "live" during a lesson (Socrative, Mentimeter, etc.) or perhaps outside of face-to-face time (Google Forms, Quizlet, etc.). The limitations of these tools is that many are limited to text only and/or take responses in the form of T/F, MCQ, Matching, Fill in the Blank, all very "traditional" ways of showing your understanding limited to knowing the correct answer and being able to express that as text.

I was quite excited to hear about a tool called InfuseLearning from my friend and former colleague Remke Langendonck.

InfuseLearning is a FREE student response tool that allows you to collect a variety of student responses (all the traditional ones) PLUS sketches, drawings, and diagrams produced on laptops, but ideally on touch screen devices like smartphones or tablets. 

How it works:Teachers go to teacher.infuselearning.com and register for a free account. Once there you are assigned a room number. This number is given to anyone who you'd like to collect responses from (audience, class, etc.). You then have the choice from the dashboard to collect a "Quick Assessment," a single question that you ask the class and they respond, or a Quiz that you have made ahead of time that you'd like to push out to the class. I'm going to focus here on how to collect a "Draw Response" from students.

Students go to student.infuselearning.com and enter the teacher's room number and their name.

Once the teachers presses the "Draw Response" button, the drawing board opens on the student's device with rudimentary drawing tools like color, line thickness, undo, delete and the student begins to sketch their answer.

When students have finished their response, the press the "submit" button and their response is sent to the teacher.

The teacher can monitor student progress during the response time by seeing who's connected and in the room, and whether they've submitted (names turn gray once response is submitted). All student responses can be viewed as thumbnails on the teacher's question dashboard by selecting "Images" and pressing "Save Results" downloads a PDF with each student name and their sketch on a separate page.
Integration:
This kind of response system could work really well in any area where you'd like students to draw or hand-write or sketch a response that you'd like to capture and/or save. Immediately I'm thinking drawing a structure of a cell in science, writing Chinese characters, drawing a graph in economics, or solving a geometry problem in math.

What ideas do you have for using InfuseLearning Draw Response?