The National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) in collaboration with the North Carolina Virtual Public School (NCVPS) offered a professional development series titled “Assessment in Online Language Courses” for online language instructors nationwide. The purpose of this series was to introduce instructors to the concepts, principles, and best practices for designing and conducting assessments in online language courses.

The series consisted of five 2-hour webinar sessions covering ten topics.

You may follow NFLRC through their pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube channel or their listserv: http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/about/11/

Are you an ACTFL member interested in Project-Based Language Learning? Sign up to support the creation of a new PBLL SIG: http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/about/12/

You can access this webinar by clicking on the above link. This is a series of free webinars hosted by edWeb.net and in this occassion, it was presented by Dr. Sue Brookhart on October 28th, 2015.

My takeaways were:

• ​Feedback is not about corrections but about next steps to improve!
• Provide students with a different assignment so that they may promptly use the feedback you have provided.
• Provide feedback on work on progress and not necessarily on graded tasks!
• If you talk about students' thinking and abilities, s/he will better perceived them.
• Feedback is always descriptive, timely and comments on the work.
• Self-assessment = self regulation 
• Peer-feedback, if well-arranged, is valuable if it's based on positive criteria.

To conclude ... join the edWeb.net Assessment community!

• Top Tech tools for Formative Assessments:

If you would like to stay well informed of whether your students know or not know the content you have been covering in class, our friends at Graphite have put together a list of online tools that will help you better assessed your students.

My favorite part of this list is that it has been reviewed by teachers in the trenches and it also includes sections on:

• Quick take on pros and cons,
• Learning Scores which include student engagement, product  adaptability and whether it offers differentiation,

... and last but not least,

• Graphite's own take on its overall use, purpose and suggested uses that teacher can give to it.

Without any further ado, enjoy these resources on the right-side bar labeled: Tech Tools for Formative Assessments or the ones below curated by Alicia Leonard:

Other tools that I personally use are:

• Kaizena

I personally use it to provide personalized feedback (oral or written) for whenever I can't meet 1:1 with each of my students in class. 
It also integrates perfectly with Google Drive!

• Playposit formerly known as eduCanon

Watching a video does NOT have to be passive learning! A true flipped classroom will make that video as interactive as possible, and here is where EduCanon integrates perfectly! 
You can use your all time favorites: YouTube, TeacherTube, Vimeo and many, many more!
Check out this review! 

... and to give it a try, click on the icon to your left! 

• Another way to check for understanding is the use of Exit Tickets
  

​... whether you use the classic pen/pencil & paper, ask students a question before they exit class or simply use Socrative, check out this reading which offers some examples and/or ideas to implement this tool in class: