Plickers

      Plickers is an assessment tool that can be used in the classroom with the use of only one device. Each student is given a card with a scannable object on it. The card represents four different answer choices based on the way it is tilted. The teacher can give a question, students answer the question by tilting the card in the correct direction based on their answer choice, and then the teacher uses his/her device to scan the room. The teacher device will assess the answer choices and give the teacher immediate feedback of who answered the question correctly or incorrectly. This is a great formative assessment tool that gives the teacher immediate feedback during the lesson, but doesn't require each student to have their own device. Plickers is also an easy way to make sure that all students are engaged in the lesson.
       I have used Plickers in my classroom mostly at the end of units in just about every subject. In math, you can create a multiple choice assessment to review the skill you taught. Students will work the problems out and then turn their Plicker card the correct way to answer the problem. This gives me immediate feedback and lets me know which students are ready to move on and which ones may need additional intervention. I have also used this in language arts in third grade to review the four sentence types. Students listened to the sentence I read and then turned their Plicker card to represent the sentence type they heard. I was once again able to scan the cards and see which students understood the sentence types and which ones did not.
       I first heard of the Plicker cards at the AETC conference in Birmingham this past summer. I love the Plicker cards and they are easy to use since my school is not a BYOD school and I only have a few devices in my classroom. The students also love them, and they are always engaged in the lesson.