1. A starter activity

Revision can help clarify how your students are processing previously acquired knowledge. So, it’s a good idea to involve your students in explaining previous lessons to each other and encourage class revision. This is a way to do formative assessments in online teaching.

For synchronous classes, assign for each live class a student to present a starter activity that involves revising the previous lesson’s content. Encourage the rest of the students to discuss and ask questions using the chat box.

But, this task requires preparation: the student will be revising to help others learn. You need, therefore, to inform that student ahead to do such a task and provide the necessary help whenever this is required. For instance, you can share the lesson record and answer questions via emails, Facebook, etc.

Besides, for effective students’ presentations set a time limit for the activity and intervene if the planned activity is taking too long or the other students are not learning from it.

No matter what platform you’re using to meet with your students online, be sure to keep a record of those starters and share them with students on your class blog, Facebook page, etc. This helps improve their understanding and facilitate their revision process.

For asynchronous classes, ask a student to prepare a summary of the day’s lesson, covering the main ideas. Then, share it with the class before engaging them with new learning. This will help you assess your students’ learning and also connect previously acquired knowledge with new learning.

2. Sticky notes questions

Checking for student understanding should not be left until the end of your online lesson. However, it should be integrated within each stage of it to help improve students’ retention and attention. Sticky note questions can help you achieve this.

At the start of a live class, after clarifying your lesson’s objective, give your students a set of questions about the most important ideas or concepts that you’ll cover in this lesson. It’s preferable not to provide them in the same order as the lesson’s ideas or content.

Then, ask your students to write each question on a sticky note and stick those notes on their desktops, laptops, or desks (they need to be visible to them during your online interactions).

While you’re explaining your lessons pause to let them identify which question focuses on that piece of information. Give them time to think and write their answers or arguments, justifying why that question relates to that content.

Students can use their copybooks to write those answers, adding their sticky notes next to them.

Listen to their answers and clarify any misconceptions. Do the same thing with the rest of the questions.

Note: before pausing to let students do this activity, make sure to explain well the content.

3. Virtual exit ticket journals

To do formative assessments in your online teaching use exit ticket journals. These can support your students to reflect on the lesson and determine whether or not they are accurately comprehending the material.

To help you gain such feedback in online teaching, I’ve created a digital exit ticket journal that you can incorporate easily into your online lessons.

This includes 200 different prompts which will help you promote your students’ reflection on their learning, gauge their understanding of your content, and gain more feedback about your online teaching.

You can use it in any subject matter with middle and high school students during the last 7 or 5 minutes of each online lesson or assign the prompt in case you have no time left.

To learn more about this journal visit my TpT store here :

4. Summaries

Various summarizing techniques can help you gauge students’ understanding online. At the end of your lesson, you can ask your students to write summary notes of the selected keywords that relate to it, write everything they remember from it, create a concept map, write headings of the lesson using their notes, etc.

If you’re going live with your students you can help them concentrate by asking them to turn off the camera for a while (specify the allotted time for that) to accomplish such a task then turn them on once they’ve finished.

5. Talk on the phone

At the end of a synchronous lesson, ask your students in pairs to pretend that they’re talking to each other about the day’s lesson on their mobile phones. They can ask each other and discuss in breakout rooms:

• how they feel about this lesson,
• what concepts they understand and what concepts they’re still struggling with,
• what they found most interesting about this lesson,
• questions they have for their teacher,
• tasks they need to work on or practice more,
• how they wish they could have learned this lesson differently, etc.

Because your students are learning remotely, this activity can make them feel more connected, express themselves, and Enjoy ‘talking on the phone’.

For asynchronous learning, you can ask your students to write such information in a Google Doc or share it on Flipgrid. Also, to gain more feedback and know about how they’re learning, prompt their reflection using the above questions.

6. Quizzes & polls

Another way to do formative assessments online is by using polls and quizzes created with Socrative or Quizlet or in-class games and tools like Quizalize, Kahoot, Gimkit, Plickers, and Flippity. These will help you know how your students are getting along with your online lessons.

However, do not overwhelm them with too many tools. Focus on one or two and make sure to clarify its objective and mode of use.

Since you can design the questions yourself, the emphasis of questioning should not be on the hierarchy of difficulty but on using different types of questions to elicit the required outcome from the students.

To this end, define the objective of your online lesson and prepare in advance your questions.

These are some ways to do formative assessments in online teaching. Keep it simple and clear so that you know about your students’ learning and you can help them improve. You CAN do it.