Formative’s Ryan Clark discusses the power of real-time assessments in the classroom and how this data empowers teachers to recognise learning opportunities at an earlier stage while giving students agency in their own development.
Ryan Clark joins Darren Hemming on the Cloud Design Box podcast to talk about this new approach to teaching and how Formative’s technology is supporting teachers to gather important data about class comprehension in and outside of the classroom.
“Formative is a future-focused EdTech company that leverages the power of formative assessments to build the perfect tool for school districts and classrooms,” Ryan explains.
“By creating real-time assessments, Formative hopes to give educators the tools and data to guide instructional decisions throughout the classroom.”
Craig Jones, the CEO of Formative, created the concept while working as a middle school Science teacher. He believed that seeing growth in real-time was the most effective way to help students improve their learning and used a mixture of different tools to track student progress and get feedback from his class.
Instruct, assess, engage and analyse.
The Formative platform offers the ability to track students’ work in real-time, allowing teachers to monitor student understanding of their lesson and adapt the lesson/assignment if the class isn’t fully understanding the subject or questions.
“The idea is to bring assessment into the instruction part of the lesson, rather than teaching a lesson and assessing the students at a later stage,” says Ryan.
“Teachers can catch any misconceptions or misunderstandings individual students – or the whole class – might be making. So rather than teaching a lesson on Monday, then finding out on Thursday the students didn’t understand the lesson, you can recognise this on Monday with the data captured with the Formative tools.”
Instant insights into your teaching.
Formative allows you to look at whole class trends and drill down into individual students, so you can see who understands the lesson and who may need additional support.
The teacher dashboard allows you to see student answers coming in in real-time and you can even change up your assessment while students are still answering questions.
You can modify assessments so that students receive marks instantly and can go through their answers straight away. Or alternatively, you can set up delayed feedback so everyone receives it at the same time, which is handy if you want to go through the answers as a class.
For more in-depth assignments and answers, teachers can offer individual feedback for students or select multiple students to offer feedback to.
Saving teachers time.
Formative connects to Microsoft 365 and Teams, meaning you can skip all the administrative tasks like uploading your classes to the Formative platform. From Teams, you can automatically transfer classes and resources over.
Ryan demonstrates how to quickly create an engaging and interactive worksheet in Formative from a Word Document.
What’s more, you can share your Formatives in Microsoft Teams so that everything your students need is all in one place.
And, if you’re a Cloud Design Box customer, all of your classes in Teams are synced with your school or trust’s MIS data, meaning everything is there for you waiting – you simply turn up and teach.
If you want to know more about Cloud Design Box and how we can help your school or MAT harness the full power of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, book a free demo today.
Catch up on all the episodes of our podcast on YouTube, Spotify or on our website.
