A teacher can employ numerous ways to assess student readiness for course content and method of delivery.

Edutopia’s Assessment group shared different types of formative assessments.

I will start off with a tool shared by The Adventures of Library Girl called Lino.  This tool can be used as a formative assessment because it enables students to post to a whiteboard and assess their readiness for the content.  Another similar tool shared by the Edutopia’s Assessment group is Padlet.

Another method for formative assessment mentioned is the use of mini- whiteboards in which “each student, or groups of students, has a mini-whiteboard. As they work through problems, they can share them either with you as a class, or you can walk around the classroom and see their work.”  While in the virtual environment this may not be possible but you can use a poll in the live virtual class session as a way of getting immediate feedback as well as create discussion groups in which students can work together.

The West Virginia Department of Education suggested the use of an exit slip in which you give students a quick quiz or ask them 3 Things I learned today-2 Things I found interesting-1 Question I still have.  I created a sample exit slip using the 3-2-1 method that I plan to use here:  http://goo.gl/forms/2duuU2RXCW.   I currently use a different type of exit slip found here: http://goo.gl/forms/rN6NfQx3pN.

There are so many different forms of formative assessments which cannot all be discussed in this post.  However, one more important point to mention is that many virtual whiteboard classrooms have checking tools like thumbs up and thumbs down in addition to their polling options which make it possible to get immediate feedback although you cannot physically see the student.

I created one more formative assessment to determine student readiness for a lesson on Expressions, Equations and Functions which is used to determine if students know the properties of functions and can add, subtract, multiply and divide functions. This is a game and the link to this assessment can be found by clicking here http://reviewgamezone.com/game.php?id=24688.  Once students complete this assessment I am able to create additional help videos to make sure that students are prepared for the summative assessment.