Instant Student Feedback

One of the really effective ways that I find to use the Classroom app with my students is to actually use it for instant feedback to understand where the children are in that lesson at that moment in time. Just like when you used to have individual whiteboards that you’d hold up and get the children to share their answers in a quiz question or something, we can do the same thing in Classroom.

All we need to do is to get the students to an app, maybe like Notes or Keynote – somewhere with a blank canvas – and then on your iPad you can make sure you’re zoomed in to see enough screens on the page at once. Don’t forget you can simply scroll through all of them.

Then, when you ask your students a question and they answer it, you can see all of their answers showing up in real time in the Classroom app because they’ve written it on their iPads themselves. It’s a really good way of doing a multiple-choice quiz or getting feedback from your students about what they’re understanding and perhaps what we need to cover again later.

And if you can’t see all 30 answers on the screen at once – perhaps it’d be too small to read their writing – another way of doing this more effectively is to get them to simply fill their page with colour. Whether it’s changing the background of their page or just drawing a big old circle and filling it red or green or yellow, because then you can immediately see blocks of colour on your Classroom app and you can use that in whatever way you need to.

Perhaps it’s a red, orange, green and blue scale to find out how the students are getting on, or perhaps it’s a multiple-choice of pink, orange, yellow and green questions. And then, when you’ve got the results from your students, you can simply select them and make a new group if you need to. So perhaps, if you were trying to gauge their understanding of the lesson and they’ve done a coloured rating at the end, you might quickly select the ones that are amber or red and put them in a group for following up the next time.

That way, you’re not going to forget where people are and you can make sure that all students get the input they need. That’s another way Apple Classroom benefits me and my class, and if you want to learn more, check out the playlist.