5 Remarkable Collaborative Learning and Formative Assessment Tools

In education, personalized learning is the key to success. Collaborative learning and a more social pedagogic processes in the classroom becomes crucial in a society that each day has less hierarchies and where leadership is being applied more by groups and less by individuals.

Since we deeply believe that formative assessment, collaborative learning and problem-based oriented curricula develops more than just critical thinking and 21st century skills, we decided to put together 5 online tools that help teachers to interact with students.

We know that these collaborative learning and formative assessment tools can improve the results of your classroom, can engage your students in class and can offer you the possibility to look at yourself as a guide and as a mentor, not only as a teacher.

This new startup is offering an incredible tool that makes any website with video content into an interactive channel of conversation, Q&A’s and feedback exchange. Annoto brings, as they say themselves “true social experience to online video for every website”.

With a very simple plug-in that can be integrated to any website with video content, and a seamless integration that does not influence existing infrastructures, students can ask teachers and professors questions during a recorded video, inserting that comment or question in the exact second where that subject was touched during the recorded class or workshop.

Annoto also offers the possibility for students to interact with each other, and for teachers and video speakers to answer various questions at once, through a intuitive user-friendly platform.

“The learning process doesn’t stop. We’ve seen teachers answering questions through Annoto’s friendly environment even during the weekend. It is comfortable, easy to use and creates engaged classrooms (…)” says Kirill Slavkin, Annoto’s CEO & Founder.

If your school, university or institution are offering video content online, you should definitely consider Annoto to increase the participation and the interest of your students in that specific subject. Worth a try!

VIA, a personal assessment learning tool, was founded after 10 years of research. Oded Reichsfeld, VIA’s founder and Intelitek’s Director of STEAM and Pedagogy has been a teacher for over three decades and discovered, during his experience in the classroom, the big importance of formative assessment.

VIA is a web-based tool for teachers, schools and educational organizations to incorporate formative assessment in an easy, fast and effective way. It allows teachers to understand the process and the needs of each individual student through a platform built with an extremely smart series of algorithms.

What VIA presents, is a new way of evaluation and communication. A fair way of evaluation that leaves way behind standardized tests and that presents a solution that is centered on the process of each student; not on the arbitrary answer given only during the final test of the semester.

This way, students get ready to incorporate change, to improve, to learn more and to understand that the learning process and its elements are, sometimes, more important than the result itself.

VIA is the ultimate tool to actually implement personalized learning and a fantastic option to create a genuine feedback and interaction between the teacher and each student of the class.

(Learn more about formative assessment in this great webinar we had a few weeks ago)

We have been driving all of our efforts to create an engaging online learning environment for students to learn STEM through robotics and coding, that allows the educator to know where each student is standing and how to cooperate directly with a specific student’s learning process.

Not so long ago, we incorporated a virtual version of the LEGO Education’s EV3 robot, and this was not a random choice. We did this because LEGO Education has always supported interaction, collaborative learning and STEM.

We believe that having these similar values is transcendental to change the worlds of education, and we feel honoured to have initiate this collaboration with the LEGO Education team.

CoderZ encourages and empowers each student to learn and to interact with the class’ educator, with the other students and with our online learning platform itself.

We discovered the power and importance of Facebook groups when we opened our exclusive community for STEM professionals. To create real interaction, we need to be where our students are.

Maybe opening a Facebook group of your class can be a good idea. Students will be able to interact with each other, to send material and to discuss class related matters in the place the will be either way: Facebook.

Remember that Facebook groups have a higher engagement and interaction than Facebook pages, and that all group members get a notification when something new happens in this online community.

We recommend you to check this possibility out! It might allow you to open a new, fun, and effective space of interaction with your students.

We agree, it is not only important for the teacher to interact with the students of the class, but also with their parents. Edmodo is a safe communication center to connect with students, other teachers and students’ family members.

In Edmodo, teachers can create groups, assign homework to the class or to specific students, program and schedule messages, evaluate the progress of the students and much more. Everything in only one online platform!

With a complete integration with the Google for Education tools and with the Microsoft’s Office an OneNote, integration with other collaborative tools is more than covered.

Involving parents in this parents, allow students’ to keep on learning about the classroom subjects after school, and even at the dinner table with the family.

If you haven’t had the chance to try out CoderZ just yet, we invite you to register for a 5-day free trial. May the code be with you!