Blog #4 GoFormative as a Digital Tool

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If I had to give GoFormative an emoji rating it would look like this: 🙆😩😨

Let me explain:
🙆 This guy represents how I was excited to begin and thought that this was the answer to how I was going to teach in the future.

😩 This is my weary face when I realized it didn't save my students' work the one time I used it before.

😨 This is when I realized that I would have to pay for a subscription if I wanted the cool features such as audio responses, which would be great for my emergent bilingual students. 

Formative teaching is quickly identifying what students know and intervening so they can learn more.  My problem with that definition and this technology tool is the amount of time that it may take for students to access a computer and log into goformative.com.  While it is an interesting tool and can be used in a multitude ways, I wish it was already implemented on a learning platform like Google Classroom.  If I decided to use GoFormative, I would have to be completely committed to using it for the whole schoolyear and then I would want all the features, which costs money.  On the other hand, you can easily embed other websites like Vocaroo or Edpuzzle into your assessment without having to make accounts for those sites.  Perhaps goformative will become a bigger beast than Google Classroom.  Ironically, Goformative does not have a PowerPoint feature yet, so here is their explanation of their site in Google Slide Presentation on GoFormative. 

I made an example of things you can use on the site.  Watch my video below.

Here is a picture of what real time work could look like:

Here is a dashboard with all the pretty things you can do with data.

I would be a little leery because I feel like this is only accessible if you have students and the account that costs money.  That is another downfall of the program; I am not able to mess around and try it because I do not have student info.  I wish they gave me a demo with student data.

Also they have a community forum where others can discuss, share, and learn new ways of using the app. 

Overall, it is an interesting website and platform, but if you decide to use it, you should commit to using it the whole year.  I say this because I think it will be important to stay constant with this for your sanity and for the sanity for the students. A part of me hopes that Google Classroom will just buy them out so Google Classroom can have all these features.  Another thought, is that this is not a quick tool unless your students are 1:1 with devices.  I think only with time would this become a quick tool for collecting formative data.  It would take lots of patience as well. 

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