Study guides have been used for years to assist students in reviewing for unit tests, final exams, or other culminating assessments. Before we talk about ways to digitalize them, let me clarify my position on assessments. I am in no way supporting only one type of assessment, in this case a final test format. I believe that as teachers we know that just using one type of assessment doesn’t truly give us all the information we need. A more realistic picture of our assessments looks more like a continuum. This continuum includes a variety of assessment pieces, including informal, observations, performance tasks, quizzes, tests, project-based, and many more authentic based assessments. Good teachers use these every day to diagnose knowledge, inform instruction, and to determine evidence of learning. With that said, there are times that study guides are needed to help students review information. Instead of simply giving students a written study guide for them to fill in basic, skill-based knowledge I challenge you to create other forms of ‘study materials’.
So, here we go…
Digitalizing Review/Study Guides
Purpose of: To review information, have students identify gaps in their understandings, and/or put learning outcomes in a more organized format.
Ways to digitalize them:
Create a Review Wiki:
Wikis are a great way to have students collaborate on any content information you want them to focus on. All you have to do is set up the pages and put in either concept/content topics or higher order questions that allow students to apply skills and content to authentic tasks. Students will go on to the wiki and add information to each section, adding their first name in parenthesis at the end so others can see who added what information. Make sure you model for your students how to add information and how to piggy-back, or build on other students’ information.
When I created a review wiki for my 6th grade students prior to their final exam in June I was amazed at how much information they added. Students were on 7 days a week adding information and when they were done many printed out the pages to use for studying.
What wiki to use? There are many formats that are free and easy to use. I have used both pbworks and wikispaces. More recently I like wikispaces because it allows you to also have discussions. With this feature you can set up discussion questions that allow students to explore topics and apply their knowledge.
Create a class mindmap:
Mindmaps work especially well if you are having students review concepts that are related to one another and want them to focus on the relationships between concepts. I have discussed using mindmaps in past posts. My choice for a class mindmap would be to use mind42.com
. This program is free and easy to set-up, and students can add website links and notes to ideas in order to add more information. Recently I was looking at the public maps at mind42 and found this one on Native Americans. This looks like it was designed as an outline for unit information. Now imagine just setting up a mindmap with big ideas/concepts and letting students add to each. You would end up with a powerful mindmap that students can use to help organize their information and their own learning.
Develop digital review ‘tests’:
The key to using an online application to create a digital review is that after taking these tests, students need to be able to receive feedback as to how they did. Taking ‘practice’ tests will not be enough to assist students in learning, so don’t forget the key ingredient: FEEDBACK.
With that in mind, many of the poll/survey programs don’t allow students to see feedback, so these would not fulfill your purpose of identifying gaps in learning, unless you used them more to inform your classroom review needs.
ClassMarker is a nice online test program that is easy to use and allows for students to view their results after taking the test so they can review their answers. This fulfills one part of good feedback: timely results. In order to have feedback appear to the students for correct and incorrect answers you would need to upgrade from the free version to the ‘professional’ version. This upgrade will cost you $24.95 a year and may be worth it if you decide to use this application with your students more than once. Adding specific feedback to each question gives students more information to evaluate their own learning gaps.
Do you have other ideas on how to have students review using digital applications? We’d love to hear about them.
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