Formative is a long-time assessment platform that allows for various auto-graded question types.

Features: Formative includes a variety of auto-graded question types, including multiple-choice, true/false, matching, and fill-in-the-blank. Its "show your work" question type even allows students to draw or write out their work and have it graded by the teacher. 

Formative also enables a teacher to transform a PDF or Google Doc into an auto-graded quiz. It also facilitates built-in questions in slides, YouTube videos and purports to detect if students copy and paste work. Formative leverages AI to intelligently group similar student responses for teachers to grade at once. It also learns from teacher scoring to provide suggested scores for future responses.

Tom’s Take: Over the years, I have greatly benefited from the "Upload & Transform" featureandthe ability to see student responses in real-time. It enables teachers to identify students who may be falling behind, or perhaps going too fast. Last year, Newsela, a leading K-12 instructional content platform, acquired Formative, combining Formative's assessment activities with Newsela's excellent content.

Price: The basic plan is free and includes unlimited lessons, assignments, and assessments, but does not include grading and feedback tools. The (“Silver”) costs $15 a month and includes unlimited lessons, assignments, and assessments, advanced question types.

Socrative is a long-standing student response system that supports auto-grading of multiple-choice, true/false, and short answer questions.

Features: Teachers can create quizzes and launch them in real-time, with student responses graded automatically. Socrative's AI provides instant feedback and generates reports to help teachers identify areas where students are struggling.

The platform also allows teachers to create exit tickets, short, targeted assessments that gauge student understanding at the end of a lesson. Socrative's AI-powered analytics provide teachers with valuable insights into student performance, identifying areas where students excel and where they may need additional support. 

Tom’s Take: I’ve used Socrative for years, both as a classroom teacher and a consultant, and Socrative has a great assortment of features for both formative and summative assessment. I’ve used Socrative mostly for its formative assessment tools and its gamification. The Space Race game in particular is a blast, and great for cooperative teamwork. Yet, the Space Race does not provide the ability to assess individual performance and, overall, I feel that Formative provides deeper student analytics from quizzes. 

Price: The free Plan accommodates up to 50 students and 5 quizzes. Socrative Pro for K-12 teachers costs $89.99/year to access unlimited quiz creation and launch multiple activities.

Wooclap is an interactive questions platform that helps educators engage students, measure their understanding, and track participation in real-time.

Features: With wooclap you can choose between 20+ question types (e.g. MCQ, word cloud, Find on image, whiteboard) or use Wooclap AI to generate quizzes in seconds from any topic or teaching material in seconds.

With Wooclap’s generative AI, teachers can create questions from an audio file, such as a music or speech, a hyperlink to a webpage, images, PDFs, and more. If you wish, you can Integrate them seamlessly into your presentation and share it with your students.

Wooclap is connected to important teaching systems (LMS, Teams, Zoom, PowerPoint, etc.) and supports all teaching models: in class, remote, synchronous, and asynchronous. More than two million educators use Wooclap at leading universities around the globe, including the University of Ottawa, Cape Town University, Duke University and many more.

Tom’s Take: In all, wooclap is intuitive, flexible, and powerful. And it’s reasonably priced. For those who have used Mentimeter, Wooclap will feel familiar. But wooclap is a far more innovative and versatile product.

Pricing: Free - up to 2 questions. Basic plan - $6.99 with unlimited questions

Nearpod is helps teachers transform their slide presentations into engaging, interactive lessons. 

Features: With Nearpod, teachers can easily add interactive activities and multimedia content into an existing PowerPoint or Google Slides, or they can also create an interactive slideshow from scratch. Additionally, teachers can search through Nearpod’s library of extensive ready-made slideshows and copy and edit them for presentation. 

Nearpod lessons can be presented live by a teacher or students can follow the lesson asynchronously at their own pace. In either case, all individual and collective student participation can be recorded and teachers can access a student participation “report” at the end of a lesson, which documents their responses and activities.

Tom’s Take: A popular cross-platform (Android, Chromebook, iOS, web) tool, Nearpod offers an impressive ange of interactive activities and multimedia content. They include multiple-choice questions, true-false questions, open-ended questions, panoramic 3-D tours, an interactive “whiteboard,” a collaborative (“post-it”) board, subject-specific games and simulations, and more. Nearpod also offers commercial-free educational videos in which teachers can insert interactive questions at specific junctures. If a teacher inserts true-false or multiple-choice questions, Nearpod can be grade student responses automatically. In addition,  student activities such as drawing or graphing on a whiteboard or posting on a collaborative board could be graded by the teacher. 

Price: Nearpod is a “freemium” tool, some features are free, but others are not -- or have limits. Free users are likely to run out of space relatively quickly, so it’s a good idea to investigate purchasing a school license.

Quizizz is a popular quiz platform designed for K-12 teachers and offers special AI-infused features.

Features: With Quizizz, teachers can create create gamified quizzes and interactive lessons and students can access questions and answers on their own devices. Teachers have the option of enabling live or student-paced session sessions.

In 2023 Quizizz introduced Quizizz AI Enhance (beta), a personalized teaching assistant to help teachers customize their Quizizz activities. Quizizz leverages AI to automatically fix spelling mistakes, simplify questions, or translate into another language. Quizizz AI Enhance also includes an option to “convert to real-world scenarios”, for instance showing how a math activity might manifest itself in the real world.

As for grading and reports, Quizizz can automatically grade quizzes or you can grade them manually. You can also set custom grades and generate and share quiz reports.

Tom’s Take: Quizizz is great for creating fun and engaging quizzes with memes, music, videos, and animations and it allows you to play live or assign quizzes for self-paced learning.

With Quizizz AI Enhance, the option to convert activities to real-world scenarios is especially intriguing and I’ve been experimenting with different scenarios in Math, Science, and Civics. It’s a unique feature that can help make learning activities more relevant and engaging for students.

Price: Basic free account up to 20 activities. Individual account $3/month. School and District plans by quote only

Kami is a versatile, collaborative learning platform that enhances classroom interactions by providing tools for real-time monitoring and instant feedback.

Features: With its Live Progress Feature, Kami enables educators to observe student activity on assignments as they are being completed. Teachers can view changes in real-time, such as annotations, answers, or edits, allowing for immediate identification of students who may need additional support. This capability helps create a dynamic classroom environment where interventions can happen precisely when they are most impactful.

In addition to monitoring, Kami facilitates instant feedback by allowing teachers to comment on student work directly within the platform. Educators can leave text, voice, or video comments, providing clear and personalized guidance to students. This feedback process helps ensure that students can address misunderstandings or improve their work without waiting for formal grading. The integration with popular LMS platforms, like Google Classroom, Canvas, and Schoology, ensures seamless assignment distribution and management.

Tom’s Take: Kami impressively supports diverse assessment styles by offering tools for quizzes, collaborative assignments, and creative projects. The platform’s flexibility extends to accommodating different file types, such as PDFs, images, and Word documents, making it ideal for a variety of educational needs. These capabilities empower educators to create interactive, formative, and summative assessments that are responsive to individual learning needs.

Price: Limited free account for teachers.

Kahoot! is a gamified quiz platform in which the student goal is to select the right answer to a question as quickly as possible.

Features: Teachers can create quizzes with multiple-choice questions, adding images and videos to make the questions more engaging. They can also import questions from previously made quizzes. Access to a question bank that allows teachers to pull in questions from millions of existing kahoots, making it easier to create quizzes on a wide range of topics. After a game, teachers receive detailed reports on student performance, showing individual and question-level insights. Teachers can also assign kahoots as homework and Kahoot! can be integrated with various learning management systems (LMS).

In addition to game-based quizzes, Kahoot! also features surveys which can be used to gather information about student knowledge, curriculum content feedback, or to generate discussion.

In 2023 Kahoot introduced the AI Question Generator feature, available for teachers on a Kahoot!+ Max plan, and all Kahoot! EDU plans. Teachers can automatically create Kahoot questions matching a designated topic. Kahoot’s generative AI will create a variety of question types based on what’s best for the format of the question. And students can create their own Kahoots with these dynamically generated questions.

Tom’s Take: Kahoot can create a fun and competitive atmosphere in the classroom and is popular with students and teachers, who often use it for review of factual curriculum content.

Pricing: The Standard Kahoot! EDU account is $12.49 per teacher per month.

Parlay is a tool powered by artificial intelligence that aids in conducting class discussions based on given topics or texts.

Features: Parlay It has the ability to formulate written or live discussion activities, boasting features such as secret identities, peer feedback, model submissions, and more. Additionally, it offers analytics and insights into student participation and performance.

Parlay is composed of three primary components: The Parlay Universe, which is a library of pre-existing discussion topics; the Written Roundtable, which is for written discussion activities; and the Verbal Roundtable. Teachers have the option to search or browse discussion topics in Parlay Universe or create their own. The Parlay Genie is a tool infused with AI that assists in creating prompts where teachers can choose the number of questions they want, input the topic, and select the grade level.

Teachers can decide whether the activity will be conducted online or live. In an online discussion, teachers can choose to create a new course or select a course they have previously created. Parlay also includes an assessment tool that enables teachers to monitor, score, and provide feedback on students' participation in the discussion and their written responses.

Tom’s Take: I love Parlay’s versatility, in that it facilitates written or live discussion activities, and encourages participation through secret identities.

Price: Parlay is free for up to 30 students.

ClassPoint AI is an AI tool that helps teachers generate questions, quizzes, and assessments based on PowerPoint slides.

Features: ClassPoint allows educators to create interactive quizzes and polls directly within their PowerPoint presentations. Teachers can receive instant feedback from students' responses to quizzes and polls, enabling them to adjust their teaching strategies immediately. It also includes gamification in quizzes, such as points, timers, and leaderboards, to make learning more engaging and competitive.

Teachers can use ClassPoint AI to create interactive presentations, engage students with polls and games, and collect feedback. ClassPoint AI also provides analytics and insights on student performance and learning outcomes.

Classpoint AI allows users to customize the cognitive complexity of the questions, ranging from remembering to creating, based on Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives.

It can also generate questions in various languages, bridging the language gap and enhancing inclusivity1

Tom’s Take: If you use Microsoft PowerPoint, but not on iOS, then Classpoint AI is worth downloading. It’s a great way to add interactive elements, such as quiz questions to your PPTs.

But it’s not designed as a quiz/test grader, so it’s likely a complimentary addition to your principal test grader. And if you typically work in a Google environment then my recommendation is to focus on Google Slides and its integration with Google Classroom.

Price: Free for class of 25 or $8/month for up to 250.