Creating and delivering a formative assessment

SMART Notebook Plus feature. Subscription required.

Create a formative assessment to test student understanding so you can guide learning effectively.

Use the Response assessment wizard to create actionable question sets. Focusing on formative assessments, this feature supports the need for educators to effectively assess students in order to guide learning. Students access assessments by navigating to hellosmart.com on their mobile devices.

To ensure the best possible user experience with assessments, see Browser, device operating system, and network recommendations.

An “exit ticket” is a good way for students to review and apply what they learned in the lesson. There are many approaches you can use. This example shows how you can use SMART response 2 to quickly create an exit ticket.

See Creating and delivering a formative assessment.

In this example, the teacher will have students answer a multiple choice quiz using Response. The teacher will use the quiz as a class “exit ticket” that tracks student understanding before the class ends. Students will answer the answers on their own mobile devices or those supplied by the school.

Open the Response assessment wizard from SMART Notebook software and quickly enter a few questions without entering the multiple choice answers. Just get the questions in quickly; they can be edited afterward.

After you’ve entered all the questions, select Edit to edit the questions, then tap Next. You can review your content and questions in the Review Content dialog.

Tap Finish. The Response assessment wizard builds the activity in a few seconds. Tell students to go to hellosmart.com on their devices, enter the activity number if required and prepare to answer the questions. The activity and activity number appears on the SMART Board. The teacher manages the start time. Here’s an example of the quiz questions:

The assessment wizard with a multiple choice question.

When the activity is ready, tap Start Activity. Students can begin taking the quiz on their devices. See Using a mobile device to access assessments. You can pause the quiz if required. The live Results animation indicates the percentage of questions the class has answered. When all students have submitted their answers, pause or end the activity. If you end the activity, all students will receive notification on their devices, and the quiz results will appear on the SMART Board.

The student view of the assessment.

After students submit their answers and the results are in, the results assessment begins. Each question is shown, and you can select a bar or pie chart to indicate the number of students who answered the question.

An example of an assessment's results.

The results dialog gives both teacher and class an opportunity to review the questions and check for student understanding. The teacher can assess student understanding immediately and make adjustments to the lesson if necessary.

To create an assessment

  1. Click Assessments in the SMART Notebook toolbar.

    The Response assessment editor opens.

  2. Select the question type for the first question. You can choose multiple choice, true or false, multiple answer, poll/opinion or short answer.

    Note 

    The question type determines the answer format. For example, a multiple-choice quiz gives four potential answers from A through D, while a true or false quiz will give only True and False answers for students to select.

  3. Enter a question and its answers. You can use up to 150 characters.

    Note 

    Each question requires at least two answers.

    Tip 

    To add an image, tap image.

  4. Select the correct answer for the question you just added.

  5. Use the Add Question button to continue adding questions. Above the Enter a question text box, you can change the question type for each question that you add. To go back and edit questions, use the Previous button.

  6. When you’re done adding questions, click Next to review all your questions.

    Tip 

    Click Save to save your question set so you can reuse it in other lessons or activities.

  7. Click Finish.

    The assessment loads and then appears on a new lesson page.

To create a question set from a previously saved file

  1. From the Notebook menu, tap Add Page.

    A new Notebook page opens.

  2. Tap in the SMART Notebook toolbar.

    OR

    Tap in the SMART Notebook toolbar and then tap response 2.

    The Add Content dialog opens.

  3. Tap Load to open a previously saved file.

    The Load Content dialog opens.

  4. Select the file to load, then tap Load.

    The question set loads and appears in the Review Content dialog. While in the Review Content dialog, you can also delete questions from your quiz.

    To delete a question, tap .

  5. Tap Finish.

    After a few moments the activity will load and will be ready to use.

  1. Previous versions of SMART Response files will be converted so that they can open in the latest version of SMART Notebook. A dialog appears when you attempt to open a file from a previous version of SMART Response:

    Message notifying you of the file conversion.

  2. Tap Convert to convert the old SMART Response questions. Each set of consecutive questions will be grouped into a new assessment.

  3. If you don’t want to group consecutive questions, select the Don’t group consecutive questions check box.

    If you select the Don’t group consecutive questions check box, each SMART Response page in the file will get a new single-question response 2 activity inserted on a new page in front of it. You will see two pages for every SMART Response page in the original SMART Response file.

  4. Tap Convert to confirm the file conversion.

  5. The converted SMART Notebook file opens.

    A banner appears indicating that the file has been converted. Select Learn More on the banner for additional information.

The conversion process does not capture certain pieces of information from SMART Response: pictures, annotations and cross references are not preserved;

  • Untranslated Yes/No and True/False labels will show as text questions A) True and B) False. If the file has been translated, the options will still be Yes/No and True/False.

  • Superscript and subscript will be formatted but no other text formatting will be converted

  • Number character references will not be maintained

  • Math question types will not be supported

  • Empty question titles will show the following default text: Incomplete question. Edit activity to complete

Once the assessment is running, it can be accessed on a mobile device if the device meets the necessary browser and connectivity requirements. See Browser, device operating system, and network recommendations.

To use a student device to complete an assessment

  1. Navigate to the lesson page with the assessment and tap the activity manager to open the assessment panel.

  2. Direct students to hellosmart.com and have them connect their devices to your class so that they can participate in the assessment.

  3. After the students are connected, tap Start to begin the assessment.

    The assessment appears on students’ mobile devices, showing the first question and the icon on the assessment page turns blue to indicate the assessment is in progress.

  4. Students select their answers and tap the arrow in the bottom right of their screens to advance to the next question.

    As students answer questions, a live feed of assessment progress appears at the display.

  5. When all questions have been answered, students tap Submit all Answers and then tap Submit again to confirm their submission and complete the assessment.

    Tip 

    The assessment controls appear in the top right corner of the page:

    • UseReset to restart the current activity.

    • Use Edit to modify the activity.

To review results on the device

When you end the assessment, students get instant feedback on their devices for each question.

Students can review results by:

  • Using the arrows at the top of their screen to scroll through the questions to see how they did on each one.

  • Tapping the hamburger menu in the top right corner to display results for all of the questions together with the percentage of questions answered correctly at the bottom of the screen.

To review results as a teacher

  1. To end the activity, tap End.

    Question-by-question results appear on the classroom display.

  2. Use the arrow in the bottom right corner of the screen to move to the next question’s results.

  3. When you are finished reviewing results with the class, you have the following options:

    • Export results: tap Export Results in the bottom right corner of the screen to save assessment results in a Microsoft Excel file.

    • Reset the activity: tap Reset Reset in the top right corner of the screen to reset the assessment.

Use the recommended web browsers, device requirements, operating systems and network capacity to ensure the best possible experience with assessments on hellosmart.com. Some websites must also be white listed before activities on hellosmart.com will work correctly.

Note 

When using assessments on hellosmart.com, students may check their website access at https://hellosmart.com/connection/check.html.

Web browser recommendations

The latest version of:

  • Google Chrome

  • Safari

  • Firefox

  • Windows 10 Edge

Notes 

  • Android devices must use Chrome or Firefox.

  • Ensure JavaScript is enabled in your browser.

Device operating system recommendations

Students playing or participating in SMART Notebook Plus lesson’s activities and assessments can use any device that’s capable of running the latest version of a supported web browser.

Important 

Mobile device-enabled activities are not currently supported on the first generation iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab 3.

Network recommendations

  • SMART Notebook assessments on hellosmart.com are designed to keep network requirements as low as possible while still supporting rich collaboration. A school that regularly uses other Web 2.0 tools should have enough network capacity to run SMART Notebook assessments on hellosmart.com. If assessments on hellosmart.com are used in conjunction with other online resources, such as streaming media, greater network capacity could be required, depending on the other resources being used.

A number of SMART products use the following URLs for software updates, collecting information, and backend services. Add these URLs to your network’s allowlist to make sure SMART products behave as expected.

  • https://*.smarttech.com (for updating SMART Board interactive display software and firmware)

  • http://*.smarttech.com (for updating SMART Board interactive display software and firmware)

  • https://*.mixpanel.com

  • https://*.google-analytics.com

  • https://*.smarttech-prod.com

  • https://*.firebaseio.com

  • wss://*.firebaseio.com

  • https://www.firebase.com/test.html

  • https://*.firebasedatabase.app

  • https://api.raygun.io

  • https://www.fabric.io/

  • https://updates.airsquirrels.com

  • https://ws.kappboard.com (for updating SMART Board interactive display software and firmware)

  • https://*.hockeyapp.net

  • https://*.userpilot.io

  • https://static.classlab.com

  • https://prod-static.classlab.com/

  • https://api.bing.microsoft.com/

  • https://*.sentry.io

The following URLs are used for signing in to and using your SMART Account with SMART products. Add these URLs to your network’s allowlist to make sure SMART products behave as expected.

  • https://*.smarttech.com

  • http://*.smarttech.com

  • https://hellosmart.com

  • https://content.googleapis.com

  • https://*.smarttech-prod.com

  • https://www.gstatic.com

  • https://*.google.com

  • https://login.microsoftonline.com

  • https://login.live.com

  • https://accounts.google.com

  • https://smartcommunity.force.com/

  • https://graph.microsoft.com

  • https://www.googleapis.com

Allow the following URLs if you want SMART product users to be able to insert and play YouTube videos when using SMART products:

  • https://*.youtube.com

  • https://*.ytimg.com