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The new holy grail: formative assessment of a PDA
posted Friday, 25 November 2005
I’ve been happily working with Handbase 3 to collect data, so it’s about time I looked for a new holy grail.
My new holy grail is to review a selection of software packages that are multi platform, and offers a simple authoring for formative assessment on a handheld. However, this has to be a certain style of formative assessment, I’m interested in drill exercises. For me this is a little odd as I’ve spent many years working along the lines of thinking about the question design to achieve higher order learning outcomes, so why the shift to the knowledge focus? Well the answer is a comment made by Andy Black at a recent presentation that we both attended, he made the comment when discussing formative assessment exercises on mobile phones, that a lot of this learning occurs when the student is bored, and not necessarily when they are highly motivated. It’s the just in time learning to fill a vacuum in time and space.
I’m going to review a couple of packages in terms of their ease of authoring, and functionality. A key requirement is that the questions need to include images, and have a means of transferring student attempts back to the instructor. Yes, I know what you are thinking, this is suppose to be formative, so why do you need the tracking? Well I like to track performance as a means of question quality assurance ;-)
So the first piece of software under the microscope will be Quizzler, from Pocket Mobility – (http://www.pocketmobility.com/quizzler/quizzler.html). The reason for choosing this software is down to Jon Trindler.
My new holy grail is to review a selection of software packages that are multi platform, and offers a simple authoring for formative assessment on a handheld. However, this has to be a certain style of formative assessment, I’m interested in drill exercises. For me this is a little odd as I’ve spent many years working along the lines of thinking about the question design to achieve higher order learning outcomes, so why the shift to the knowledge focus? Well the answer is a comment made by Andy Black at a recent presentation that we both attended, he made the comment when discussing formative assessment exercises on mobile phones, that a lot of this learning occurs when the student is bored, and not necessarily when they are highly motivated. It’s the just in time learning to fill a vacuum in time and space.
I’m going to review a couple of packages in terms of their ease of authoring, and functionality. A key requirement is that the questions need to include images, and have a means of transferring student attempts back to the instructor. Yes, I know what you are thinking, this is suppose to be formative, so why do you need the tracking? Well I like to track performance as a means of question quality assurance ;-)
So the first piece of software under the microscope will be Quizzler, from Pocket Mobility – (http://www.pocketmobility.com/quizzler/quizzler.html). The reason for choosing this software is down to Jon Trindler.
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