My current use of GoFormatives

 I have used GoFormative for a few years. In the past, I mainly created some example Formatives to show to my teacher trainees (pre-service and in-service) to show how they could use GoFormative to create engaging and interactive Reading Comprehension tasks to be attempted by their ESL students. In other words, I seldom used GoFormative for my own lectures at the university. 

But amidst the current need to conduct lecture sessions online, I have found that GoFormative is also useful to my own teaching. This is because my lectures at the university (my students are pre-service and inservice teachers training to become qualified ESL teachers) are each 2 hours and 30 minutes in duration. When these long lectures have to be conducted online, you can imagine the challenge that I have to face in engaging my students for that length of time. 

Recently, I started to include GoFormative tasks in my own lecture sessions. So far, I have mainly used Formatives for mid-session knowledge check, i.e., about half way into a 2.5-hour lecture, I will assign a Formative to the class for them to try. The formative questions mainly provide a chance for them to either check their understanding, or apply what they have learnt in the first half in solving a problem. 

What follows is a recent example that I tried out. The lecture session was about English modal verb phrases (The Chinese language has an entirely different way to express modal meanings.). The first half of the lecture was mainly concerned with (a) the form of the modal verbs in English, and (b) the possible functions that English modal verbs can serve. Half way into the session, I invited the teacher trainees to try the formative. 

The first question invited them to match 10 utterances to 5 functions. This was a way for them to check their understanding: 

The second question made use of a public sign that I spotted some time ago, and which I took a picture of. The question invited the class to re-write the announcement using the correct form of the modal verb in question. This question gave them a chance to apply their knowledge of the form of the English modal verb phrases: 

This experience turned out to be quite a useful knowledge check format to be used half way into a long lecture. 

Actually, I have noticed the new functions that GoFormative has taken on, one of which is 'Add Sections'.  My next attempt will be to use this new function to create a longer unit for presenting parts of a lecture as well as providing periodic knowledge check during a lecture.