(re-posted from http://feasst.wlecentre.ac.uk/)
Powerpoint is usually condemned as the archetypal counter-example to formative e-assessment. PowerPoint doesn’t have any mechanism for collecting feedback from the audience, once you your presentation is rolling there’s little you can do to change its course.
PollEverywhere changes that. Their plugin allows you to conduct polls, collect responses by twitter or other tools, and display them as text or charts. Now all you need is a few action buttons, and you have a contingency point in powerpoint: a junction where you change your presentation path based on audience feedback.
As always, the specific technology is an illustration. You may know of other tools that do the same (and please add them in the comments). What you should take from this is the design pattern.
While we’re on the subject, the outputs from the formative e-assessment project’s dissemination event are available at:
And version 2 of the report at:
Assessment is an integral part of teaching and learning. If the relationship between teaching and learning were causal, i. e. if students always mastered the intended learning outcomes of a particular sequence of instruction, assessment would be superfluous. Experience and research suggest this is not the case: what is learnt can often be quite different from what is taught. Formative assessment is motivated by a concern with the elicitation of relevant information about student understanding and / or achievement, its interpretation and an exploration of how it can lead to actions that result in better learning. In the context of a policy drive towards technology-enhanced approaches to teaching and learning, the question of the role of digital technologies is key and it is the latter on which this project particularly focuses. The project and its deliverables have been informed by recent and relevant literature, in particular recent work by Black and In this work, they put forward a framework which suggests that assessment for learning their term for formative assessment can be conceptualised as consisting of a number of aspects and five key strategies. The key aspects revolve around the where the learner is going, where the learner is right now and how she can get there and examines the role played by the teacher, peers and the learner.