Blown Away by ActiVote!

The title says it all. Today I was teaching a lesson on fractions with my new S3 credit class of 30 pupils. They have all covered how to do arithmetic with fractions before, but we always have a quick reminder at the start of S3, because it is so important.

I started the lesson by handing each pupil an ActiVote pad (and noting which number they had), then put up a question about fractions on the whiteboard. Once they had answered the question in their jotters, I put up 4 multiple choice answers for them to choose from. The wrong answers were chosen to pick up on common mistakes in adding fractions. The pupils then voted. 10 seconds later, we had a bar chart on the board showing how the class had voted. 70% got it right. At this stage the process was entirely anonymous. I moved on through another 3 questions and votes. I then asked pupils (that I knew had got correct answers) to come up and show us their workings. We discussed the ways people could have got wrong answers, then the class started doing some practice from a textbook.

The data from the votes can be exported to a spreadsheet with one click - so I then had a clear record of how everyone in the class had performed on those 4 initial questions, and was able to target my time talking to those who had had problems. Had I realised what a razor sharp tool the ActiVote pads were going to be, I would have prepared some problem solving work with fractions for the pupils who got all the starter questions right. It had never dawned on me that I would be in a position, 15 minutes after the start of the lesson, to say with confidence exactly which pupils in my class had a good grasp of the initial objective.

This is amazing! No pupil has been shown up in front of their peers as having made a mistake, the flow of the lesson has not been interrupted, but I have at my disposal a wealth of formative assessment data. Every day I am faced with the challenge of dealing with pupils as individual learners when they appear in front of me in classes of 30. Wireless voting pads are the most amazing formative assessment tools I have ever seen. I am truly blown away!