Have you heard of Plickers?!
Plickers are a simple formative assessment tool to use in your classroom. They require minimal technology. All you need to use plickers is a smartphone or tablet loaded with the plickers app and a printer!
Below I will share with you on how to set up your account and ways that you can use plickers. I have used plickers in both my Kindergarten and 5th Grade Classrooms. Below I will also share how to use plickers for math! (I also included a freebie!)
How Plickers Works
Step 1 - Sign up for free at
plickers.com
Step 2 - Add you class! You can add multiple classes under your account, for example I teach 2 classes of Math and Social Studies.
Step 3 - Upload your roster, you can copy and paste your roster into the class. You can choose to sort by first or last name. I sort by last name so that they line up with the number they have for the school year.
Step 4 - Go into your LIBRARY and create some folders. I suggest using folders because your questions will be organized and therefore can be managed more easily.
Step 5 - Create your questions. Within each folder you can create the questions for your students. You will also insert the answers options and select the correct response.
Step 6 - Try it out! Print off your free plickers cards in your account. Do not laminate them, the shine can prevent them from working properly. Also - encourage your students to take care of them because if they are bent they may not read correctly. Remember though - my kinders could do this! Set your expectations, or keep them in a safe place ;).
Step 7 - Check our your reports! When you then scan your students plickers, those with the correct response will be shown in green. You can also go into the reports tab to see a break down of your results, as well as print your data! What a fun way to assess your students! (yes, there can be some user error on the part of your students - so I recommend having them practice and become familiar before using this as an assessment.)
How I Use Plickers
I started using plickers when I was teaching Kindergarten. Yes, my 5 year olds were able to manipulate these cards! I stuck mostly with true and false questions. They were also sucessful with MC questions!
This year I am teaching 5th grade Math, Language and Social Studies. I introduced plickers to my students on the 1st day of school. I wanted to quickly have them become familiar with the cards so that I could use them as a form of assessment later in the school year. I had my students complete a survey for how they best learn. This was able to provide me with an insight into the makeup of my classroom.
I moved on to using plickers to have my students respond to comprehension questions from our read alouds. I honestly have to say, my students LOVE using plickers. It is a great way to break up the day. They do often want to see the graph break down of how many people got the answer correct, but I rarely share that with them.
Using Plickers for Math Assessment
Okay, right now the program does not allow for creating math equations. However! If you save your problem as an image you can upload it! As you can see below. I created the question and answers on the same image. I uploaded that image as my question and simply selected the correct answer.
Click
here for some images I created to review for place value. I will be continuing to use Plickers to review for our math assessments. I use enVision 2.0 so I will be continuing in that order. Be sure to check back through the link for additional images.
I hope they will be useful for your classroom!
