Zach Diamond 0:03 Welcome to the Modern Classrooms Project podcast. Each week, we bring you discussions with educators on how they use blended, self-paced and mastery based-learning to better serve their students. We believe teachers learn best from each other. So this is our way of lifting up the voices of leaders and innovators in our community. This is the Modern Classrooms Project podcast. Zach Diamond 0:28 Hello, and welcome to episode number 136 of the Modern Classrooms Project podcast. My name is Zach Diamond, and I'm a middle school digital music teacher in Washington, DC. And I'm also a modern classrooms implementer and mentor. And this episode is going to be really special because we actually have a guest host tonight. So I'm going to be muting my mic in a little bit. And I'm going to hand it over to Monte Woodard, who has been a guest on this podcast a couple times and is actually a previous coworker of mine. So I'm really excited to have Monte on to host this episode on formative. Monte, how's it going? I'm so glad to have you back in. It's so great to talk to you again. Monte Woodard 1:06 I'ts just going so well. You know, I'm super excited to be back on the podcast. It's been a very long time. And people still say, Hey, I heard you on the podcast. And it's been at least a year. So I'm very excited to be back. Zach Diamond 1:19 Well, you get to re-up that that time now. Yeah. So Monte is a middle school science teacher and also a modern classrooms mentor. And I think pretty much of modern classrooms rockstar at this point, right? Like you do webinars and other stuff, too, right? Monte Woodard 1:31 Yeah, I'm pretty busy. But you know, I'm staying humble, of course. Zach Diamond 1:35 Great. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and just turn it over to you, Monte, we have a fantastic episode planned for you here on formative, the tool, Formative capital F. And I'm gonna let Monte just take it away. Sounds good. Monte Woodard 1:48 Yeah. So as I say, we are talking about formative today. And I'm actually joined by Carlo Schmidt, who is the Director of Product at Formative. How're you doing today, Carlo? Carlo Schmidt 1:58 I'm doing great. I kind of feel like a third wheel after listening to you to talk about how well you know each other. Monte Woodard 2:03 No, no, don't feel like a third wheel. By the end of this, e'll all be best friends. And it'll be great. We're so excited to hear all about formative today. So can you just tell us, Carlo just to give us a short blurb of what Formative is your mission, you know, what you do with your organization? Carlo Schmidt 2:21 Yeah, totally. Our mission and vision are basically, you know, to, to accelerate learning, and basically, to put tools in the hands of teachers that they can use on a daily basis to promote real time feedback with their students, we strive to give you all as many tools as possible in that toolkit to be as flexible as possible with that. We were founded by a teacher named Craig Jones, he's our current CEO, who, you know, years ago knew there was just a better way to formatively assess students in his class. And at the time, there weren't tools on the market to do it. So Craig, being the entrepreneur and tech guy decided to build on himself. And thus started formative. And Craig use that tool at the time to get to basically the 99th percentile and academic growth over time, and has been really passionate about us just making teachers lives better, and putting tools in teachers hands that make their lives better ever since. Monte Woodard 3:21 And I use formative in my own classroom. And I think it's just, it's a really great tool. And it's something that I actually stumbled across, you know, this school year, and I just can't believe I hadn't stumbled across it beforehand. You know, and so I know some of my favorite features of Formative, you know, for example, I love how formative allows for just, it's a lie. I don't want to use a million, but it's a lot of different types of questions and ways that you can assess students, there's like, fill in the blanks. There's like, you know, recordings where they can record answer, there's obviously multiple choice check checking boxes. So I would love to just hear from you, you know about the various features and Formative you know, what teachers can do with it. So that, you know, our listeners who don't have any experience with Formative can kind of hear you know, you know, why Formative is the best? Carlo Schmidt 4:12 Yeah, well, thank you for saying we're the best number one. I mean, that's what we always want to hear and strive to hear. I think, you know, Monte, if I think about how to put it succinctly, we're the tool that can take any sort of your any of your paper based curriculum and turn it into digital content at our core, right. And obviously, we can take a lot of your digital content, and level up its game to by, you know, embedding things into our product and things like that. But ultimately, we want to be able to help you to kind of digitize your whole instructional day so that you can get real time feedback and see your students answering questions and interacting with content real time throughout the whole course of your class. Monte Woodard 4:54 Yeah, which is really cool. I know that digitizing piece is super important for modern classroom too, because you know, in a modern classroom, you know, students are tending to work, you know, at their own pace. And you know, one of the things that's super important, and we get a lot of questions about mastery checks in particular, specifically related to the idea behind, you know, how can we, you know, make sure that students are, you know, doing what they're supposed to do, as well as you know, how to even utilize mastery checks in a super effective way. So I'd be curious to know, from you, you know, just specifically about how those different features in Formative, you know, can really serve teachers that are using more of a self paced or blended model structured in their class. Carlo Schmidt 5:35 Yeah, totally. I've been lucky enough to talk to a few folks who are using Modern Classroom Project and kind of learn actually how they're using Formative so can speak to that from what I've actually seen in the field, too, which is pretty neat. I, about a month ago, I think or two months ago, I had the pleasure of observing geometry teachers class out here in Colorado, who's a modern classroom savant. And it was great Monte. So the, I'll just talk about how she was using, there's a ton of different ways you can use Formative, which is kind of the best part about it with how flexible it is. But basically, what she had done was she posted herself up at the front of the classroom, and was calling students up to the front to support them individually, right. So like, she wanted to work with them on specific concepts or things like that. And the whole, like 90 minute class period, all of the other students were working on their mastery checks, working on their homework, working on various things at their computers using Formative. And what those students were doing was they were doing math problems, obviously, math teacher, but they were using Formative to continually check to see whether they were working towards the correct answer at their own pace. And then working to what we hear a lot of our teachers say is, quote unquote, get to green is how we hear teachers talk about it, they want students to, to work to get that answer correct. And to have multiple attempts at getting that answer. Correct. So for, you know, 60 to 90 minutes, while she was supporting individual students coming up to the front of the room to ask her questions or on things she wanted to work with them on, the rest of the class was self paced, and working on work at their own pace and getting feedback from Formative how they were doing along the way, and whether their answers were correct or incorrect, and then could you know, help each other out. So in that instance, there were the students were actually helping each other when they were struggling and moving over to different tables to help each other see what they had done correctly or incorrectly, which was a pretty cool use case. And I think that's really one of our sweet spots. Monte I'd love to kind of learn from you, if I'm, I'm talking about this appropriately with how you use it potentially to, but really just giving students that real time feedback on how they're performing. So that it empowers the teacher to do other things are to work individually with students are letting the other students work at their own pace. And the teacher is not having to continually check in and say, Hey, you got that? Right. He didn't get that, right. But it's kind of free to support learners, as he or she sees needed. Monte Woodard 7:56 Yeah, the real the feedback immediately, like I can actually see as they're working, you know, I tend to have my students take their master checks on, like, at the same time, and, you know, as they're typing in real time, I can kind of see what they're doing, you know, dropping a piece of feedback, if I noticed that, I'm like, you might want to reread the question if I'm seeing that they're kind of, you know, headed in the wrong direction, and whatnot. But I think, personally, for me, the one thing I really love about Formative is, you know, I, I'm a fan of Google forms, I use them all the time. But I think what kind of takes Formative to the next level, is that, you know, it gives me you know, a report, it puts up a report. And so I'm able to not only see, you know, students responses and their grades by class, but I'm also able to see it by Summit, like by the Formative that I do. So, you know, for example, if I have, you know, two blocks that take the same quiz, I'm able to kind of look at the answers of all of those kiddos in both classes and see trends across both classes, not just the one. And so I really appreciate Formative being able to just kind of give me a really great snapshot, like in the moment of like, how many kids have taken it, you know, whether or not the assessments even still open, you know, and just get a really nice view of what questions you know, really popped out the percentage a two, I love being able to look at the percentage and say, like, oh, 100% of them got this question wrong, versus, you know, 60% of the kids got this question, you know, wrong, right. And it's a really great tool for me as a teacher to on the, in the moment, just be able to, like, navigate and like pivot if I need to. Yeah, Carlo Schmidt 9:31 One of the things you reminded me of all you're saying that which, you know, obviously I work at Formative some Formative junkie, myself, but I'm thinking about the case to you or the team, you know, you you want you're obviously giving individual feedback to students, as you're seeing them, you know, make various misconceptions while they're working with content that's coming in in real time. But one of the things that I love that we do too, is your ability to send feedback to groups of students. So if you see, you know, 10 students making the same misconception or you want to send them a link To extend their learning because they knocked it out of the park, you can quickly select those 10 students and send them the same feedback versus having to send that individually to each individual student. Right. So it allows for you to kind of creatively group students and send them to what they need to do next to in a way that I think is a lot different than other products. Monte Woodard 10:19 Yeah, and you know, just one really small thing that we sometimes don't even think about, you know, Formative also has a feature where you can hide student names. So, you know, I actually, I actually didn't really think that that was a big deal. Until one day, you know, I went into grade, you know, they're formatives, and I hit the student names, and I just kind of went in randomly as kids finished and was like clicking. And, you know, you just don't notice sometimes how, if you know, a certain kid explains things in a certain way, how you might be more lenient on their answer to someone else. And, you know, by having the names hidden, I found that I was actually a little bit more strict on my grading, like, I tended to stick closer to my, you know, grading norm as opposed to sometimes when I know the kid that might might struggle, but I know like, what they're getting at where I'm like, okay, I can give you the point. And I actually think that's a really underrated feature that a lot of things don't always have, like being able to hide the pseudo names, it's great, Carlo Schmidt 11:14 man, I just got goosebumps when you said you use it that way. Because it's such a beautiful way to like, eliminate as much bias as you can in your grading as as possible right in the classroom. And that hide student names is used in a lot of different ways. Some people will be presenting on the screen right with the student names hidden and having their class looking at the questions that they struggled with and talking about how, but man Monte, I love that you're using that for scoring to eliminate some of those biases, that's kind of a beautiful way to use it, I think, the ideal way and the way we want people using a lot of those things. Monte Woodard 11:46 Yeah, and I think one last feature that people you know, especially those that work in settings, where, you know, IEPs, and five, oh, fours are very prevalent, and, you know, they're always cognizant of that, you know, there's also a feature in Formative where you can, you know, assign, you know, your formatives, you can give specific accommodations to kids, you can change the timing that kids are able to have, yeah, so that, it looks like everybody's getting the same thing. But again, you're modifying it, you can kind of put in some of those accommodations, you know, for kids, and Formative will kind of, you know, change the time or whatever, based on the settings you put in, which I think is also just a really great tool for, you know, us to, you know, be able to give those things without necessarily holding a kid back or being like, Oh, you get more time than this. You know, I feel like sometimes in class, I'm very aware of saying certain things out loud. But Formative can naturally just do this, like on its own, which is really cool. Carlo Schmidt 12:37 Yeah, it's funny, you mentioned that, I think, you know, a lot of assessment and just edtech tools struggle with 504s and accommodations. But one of one of my favorite use cases for how folks are using Formative in that regards is just literally the teacher recording their own voice reading a passage or reading a question and letting any student listen to his or her recording of their voice while they're doing it. A lot of you know, like, the text to speech features, you see in a lot of different platforms read the text in such a nonhuman way that is, we say it's accessible, but it becomes less accessible to students because it sounds not like a human reading it. But it's really nice, like Monte, maybe you're using it this way that you're not but you know, a lot of folks are doing modern classroom stuff, flipping their classroom, they'll record video of their instructional, they'll record themselves reading things out and let the students listen to that at their own pace. Which is another really nice use case for how you can can use like audio recordings and video recordings on our platform. Hey, Monte, real quick, do you use teacher pace mode at all? Monte Woodard 13:33 I haven't actually used teacher pace mode yet is normally student paste. Carlo Schmidt 13:37 Okay, so that's just one area. I mean, I recommend you give it a shot. Basically, they'll force all of your students to be on the same question as you're seeing on the screen or, or all of your students to navigate through only one section of a Formative at a time. So like you could do your due now. And then you could do your lesson, you can put that all in one Formative U S. S sections, you could click the teacher pace it and you could open up the do now for students and they can't move past it. And you could open up the lesson for students and they can move past it. So when I was talking about digitizing the whole classroom, like the whole period of class, you can do that with teacher pace mode and pacing sections. Monte Woodard 14:15 Very cool. Yeah, I did not know that. Actually. I normally just make it and I'm like alright, children do the thing. Carlo Schmidt 14:20 Yeah, I think it's it's an amazing tool that I think people will either don't know it's there or like you're so busy, right Monte in your day that you're like, let me make this. Let me get it to them. So I can get to working with the students. So a lot of people don't even check it out. But it really is that sort of, you know, for lack of better words Nearpod like experience that we offer informative, where you can be presenting and making sure that students are seeing the exact same thing that's on your screen that students are seeing on their screen. You can hide the names in real time, you can pull up response frequency and discuss with your class like why they chose a particular distractor it has a lot of cool things in there that might be worth checking out. Monte Woodard 14:58 Yeah, which is really cool. I think Because sometimes, you know, modern classrooms, teachers are craving for some more of that whole class type stuff. So yeah, I actually really love that I definitely have to try it out, which kind of leads us into? You know, the next question. I know that, you know, Formative has, you know, just a version, you can sign up for free. They have a pro version, or silver, it's called Silver, which is what I'm signed up for, because we only have a handful of teachers at my school that use it. And then there's also a school like the gold plan, which I think is technically for schools. So Carla, would you want to kind of talking through some of the differences between like the free the silver and the gold plan? For people who might not know? Carlo Schmidt 15:35 Yeah, totally. Our free plan is basically, you know, and for what it's worth, we never, this might sound crazy to you, Monte, hopefully, you've heard this from us, but we never want teachers to have to pay for Formative. So we will go out of our way to give you silver for free. If you can help us, you know, set up a meeting with your school admin with your principal with your district Haven't you interview, do an interview with our product team, we extend your silver, so we really don't want teachers paying for silver, we want the schools to purchase it for them. But at its core, our bronze plan, which is our free plan, is more limited item types, but it's free forever. The silver plan that you're on, Monte has all of the item types that you could ever want. But what you're missing in that silver plan right now is some of our anti cheat functionality, copy paste detection, Respondus, LockDown Browser, some of those types of things. And that's really where the the gold plan shines with some of that anti cheat detection as well as the the tracker view that we have for students and how they're performing. For you. Monte you're, you're limited right now to a 14 day time period in which you can look at that student performance, whereas our gold plan has that, you know, full historical look all the way back to the beginning of time. But, uh, you know, like I said before, we're and we're pretty passionate about this to Monte, you, you could extend you could never pay for Formative again, if you just help us to connect with your district admin, if you interview with the product team, let us observe your classroom and understand how you're trying to use it. That stuff is incredibly important to us. So those are those are, I'd say the key differences between between the various plans as you kind of scale up to the gold plan. But yeah, ultimately, we want to get you on gold. If we can Monte and maybe you can help introduce us to your principal or to your school or district. Monte Woodard 17:24 Yeah, it's actually it's actually a conversation topic. And so I guess my follow up question to that, then is, is there a certain number of teachers that are like recommended for gold plan, or because right now we have just maybe eight teachers, and so the school pays for silver individually for each of us. And it's the conversation of whether or not you know, gold even make sense. So if another school I work at a private school, small school, you know, if another school was in a similar situation of we only have a handful of teachers, is it worth their while to invest in the gold plan? Carlo Schmidt 17:56 I mean, I, I think there's no better plan to be on the gold at Formative personally. I mean, I'm also somewhat biased and saying that, but the things like the copy paste detection are really wonderful features to help you as a teacher to see whether your students are just copying and pasting things from other applications in the Formative as well as that full historical look back on your data that you get on the gold plan and a whole lot of other really nice integration features, whether it's with one roster or respondents and things like that. I don't think there's like a to me, I don't think there's a tipping point for it necessarily Monte in terms of number of teachers, like we're happy to get you gold for your particular department, at your school, your district, and we believe in want you to have it. So, you know, could be eight people, obviously, we want the whole school informative, because we think it's the best tool to help teachers with their formative assessment and learning needs in the classroom, but got to start somewhere. Monte Woodard 18:48 Very true. Very true. So I know we very briefly started kind of talking about this. But you know, one thing that's on a lot of people's mind, especially around this time of the year is, you know, state testing and being able to track, you know, students and how well they're mastering the content. And so I would love to kind of hear from you about, you know, ways that Formative can actually make that a little bit easier for teachers versus say, me just keeping my random Google Classroom, you know, gradebook. Carlo Schmidt 19:18 Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know how you would even do it in your Google Classroom Gradebook, right? Like the, and I don't know, if you Monte, are you aligning your questions to standards? No, I'm Monte Woodard 19:28 not actually Carlo Schmidt 19:30 You're not, that's okay. And that's totally fine. You don't have to be a lot of teachers. But you know, formative assessment typically doesn't have a million different standards aligned to it in the first place. It's normally one or two. But that tracker view that you have Monte, which shows you every Formative also has a view that shows you every standard. So you have I mean, this is the beautiful thing, right? Like you have full visibility into every student in your classroom and how they're performing. Not only on every Formative but every standard and not only on every standard, but every question so In that tracker view that you have Monterrey you can open it up. And you could say, oh, it looks like Carlo is really struggling on the standard. And you can click on my, let's say, let's say I'm at 67% on for two years, and you can click there. And then you can see all of my student work that is aggregating up into that particular standard. For visibility, like we don't care, what we don't care what Formative is on as long as it was tagged to that particular standard, we let you view it. And similarly, like, if you're not talking to standards, that's fine, too, right? Like Monte, you might have like your, you know, part of me, I don't know, middle school science, very well, maybe you're doing like chemistry elements, or something like that in seventh grade, you can click on that Formative at a glance and see all the other students other formatives to see all of the touch points they had, and all the questions they had there. And to me, that's a beautiful thing, right? Because like, if you're not looking at student work, then how are you really understanding the misconceptions your students are making in the classroom? Yeah, the like, auto grading stuff is great. And you should be using that too. But there's this element of like looking at the work and how students are getting to their actual response in their problems, that is a really nice place to be as well. And with us, you have with a click of a button, you can see all of that, in one view, you don't have to go to you know, 30 different formatives to find it. And I think that's really where where some of the magic can happen as schools and districts and teachers might be preparing for their state tests. Maybe it's this time of the year. And you just want to see man, let me a meeting one on one with Karla during lunch today. Let me see what he struggled on. And let me give him some opportunities to remediate or even extend those particular concepts. You have that at your fingertips in our tracker. Monte Woodard 21:36 Yeah. And it's a very easy process. The reason why I haven't done it, it's just because I'm lazy. But I promise, everyone listening, it's a very easy process to assign your standards. You know, I have a coworker at school. And he's very, you know, he loves Formative. And so he does this, and I've seen the tracker, and it's just, it's a tremendous amount of information. So it really can help, you know, take your tracking of stuff to the next level. Yeah, well, I'm Carlo Schmidt 22:01 sure what it's worth for what it's worth, there's probably some things we can do to make it even easier for Fox sumathi. So don't critique yourself too harshly there. Monte Woodard 22:12 It's okay. I'm self aware. So we talked a lot about how Formative can be used for like things like mastery checks, or like testing. But you know, are there other uses that teachers could use Formative for besides just assessing? Carlo Schmidt 22:25 Yeah, I mean, I think like there's, we've seen a million I'm always amazed Monte Honestly, when I learned about the different use cases for Formative because of how flexible the question creation was that we've talked about at the start. And because how easy it is for you to get data on your learner's and see it in real time, I think it just kind of opens up a world of possibilities to a lot of folks, I honestly really enjoy the folks who are using it for quick SEL checks, right? So so they'll just post some questions about how students are feeling that day as they're entering the classroom to better understand before they move into their content. So there's some really cool ways people are using or though they'll create a Formative and their first section, might be a quick SEL, check, pulse check, how are you feeling? Right, like a wellbeing check. And then they might move into maybe more of the instructional piece. And then they might move into a self paced part of their lesson. And then they might move into these other sections. And all of that you can put on a single Formative, which is, which is striking, right? Like normally, we think about the SEL checks and things like that being totally separate from the lesson itself, but they're not to us informative, they can be one in the same thing. And honestly, they probably should be one in the same thing. So that's like, I think that's one of my favorite use cases, just because I think it's, well hopefully every teacher is thinking about those particular things. But bringing, bringing some more student voice to the work that they're doing, I think is kind of critical for our students to get more buy in into the learning that they're doing. So the SEL checks, I really think are beautiful way and like different way of thinking about the product that is not often utilized. But you know, we have a million different ways Monte, you know, some of our world language teachers just as an example. And I might be veering a little bit off track, but we'll have students record themselves in the platform, reading passages, right. And then the teacher will give the student feedback on that passage. We have had, we did this internally at Formative where we basically recorded people talking about what Formative solves as a video response. And then we had a rubric internally to kind of give them feedback for how they did. So like, there's business applications, too. Honestly, there's a million different applications for it. I think, really, it's about your creativity and how you can gather data ultimately. Monte Woodard 24:42 Yeah, I love that I didn't even think about like the SEL thing. I love the idea of you know, using it in a much bigger way, especially because if we can use it in more ways, you know, we can, you know, have the conversation about like, you know, why is it valuable beyond just testing in our class. Awesome. So I really love that you said that very good nugget here. Yeah, I Carlo Schmidt 25:04 think I used to, you know, I used to work for the, I worked for the KIPP schools for a really long time and kind of in charter schools in New York City. And I is kind of, you know, that was a long time ago, but the assessment was already always separate from that stuff, right? It was like, Hey, sit down, do your thing. Now, let me hand out paper or you're logging into some site to take something but why do we separate the like, quick SEL check in from the assessment itself? Like, can you actually separate those things from the student? You know, like, those are two very intimately related things. And I think it's nice that we can support you and gathering data on both of those things on the same Formative, Monte Woodard 25:39 yeah, very cool. Not even a way I ever thought about. I love that. So you know, I am at a Google Classroom school, we use Google Classroom. And so I know Formative has just very natural integrations into Google Classroom I rosters I was automatically able to sync. But we do have a lot of listeners who come from schools where they're using things like Canvas and Schoology, and other ones that I can't think of right now. And so I'm just curious to know about integration. So I know there's integration with you know, Google Classroom, but are there integrations with some of these other learning management systems that make it a little bit easier for teachers to, you know, merge rosters and things like that? Carlo Schmidt 26:18 Yeah, we are the word that we use in the tech industry is LTI compliant, which is literally just a fancy word of saying, Hey, can you pass rostering data easily back between platforms. So any platform and Canvas is one of those Schoology is one of those, you know, Google Classroom is another one, all of these platforms are quote, unquote, LTI compliant, which all that means is that they make it easy to pass rostering between the two. So we try to make rostering as simple as possible. A lot of our lot of our folks, he's clever as well, which is a pretty frequent one that we make it really easy to integrate with. So rostering is is pretty basic, and pretty simple. If you're using one of the main tools on the market, I would say if you're using some Mom and Pop LMS, or you know, you have a adventurous coder at your school, who built your school, their own LMS might be a little bit more difficult. But we don't have many folks doing that these days. And then we also offer some flexible ways to administer and take the the Formative in some of those LMSs. So for example, you can take a Formative inside of Canvas, so the student isn't actually leaving Canvas as they're taking that Formative. So there's there's various levels of integrations we have with with different LMSs. But we take a lot of pride in being interoperable, and making sure that we're open and passing that data back and forth in an easy way. Monte Woodard 27:36 Yeah, and I do know that in this is a weird question, but it's just about sign on. I know, like sometimes when having students sign up for accounts, is fairly easy. And I know my students are able to sign in with Google. But they go they click the Google button. But are there other ways beyond just email? Like, are they can they sign in directly the other platforms? Or is it just a Google thing? Carlo Schmidt 27:59 Yeah, I would say honestly, like the majority of our folks who are, especially in larger districts, or districts that have things like clever classlink, that's probably the primary way that our students are accessing Formative is through those various Single Sign On options that the schools are offering. Monte Woodard 28:13 Perfect. Yeah, because I feel like that makes it so much easier when they can like, sign in with Google. And it works out so much better. Carlo Schmidt 28:20 Last thing you want to you want to worry about as a teacher is teaching your kids how to sign into the platform, right? You just want to click and go and get to the content. Monte Woodard 28:27 That's right, we love easy because they forget password. Single Sign On is the way to go. Um, so where can listeners learn more? And how can they connect with, you know, you or the Formative team to learn more about the platform and or, you know, get questions answered about, you know, possibly upgrading your school? Yeah. Carlo Schmidt 28:47 So the website, obviously, is formative.com, which is a good starting point, I would say, a lot of our teachers are really active in our Facebook communities. So we have a Formative educators group on Facebook, we also just recently created subject specific Facebook community. So we have a, you know, community for our math educators community, for science educators, and so on and so forth. Those are really wonderful places to go to see how, you know, fellow educators are using Formative and thinking about Formative that are coming from fellow educators and not from us as a company, which I really like. I like it when y'all are hearing it from other people using the product. You know, Monte, you said, I think you learned about Formative from a colleague, right? That's kind of like why we exist today is people talking about us with her colleagues and each other. So the facebook facebook group is a wonderful place to go to look at that. And then, you know, I also like if you're interested in Formative, if you're even a bit curious after hearing some of these things, just go make an account. You can make a free bronze account, we upgrade everybody to silver initially. So you'll get all the features of silver for the first I think it's you know, 30 days or something like that. It's probably even more at this point. So you can experience it yourself. And to me the Monte, you didn't ask me this, but Like, I think the best part is, it's really hard for you to mess stuff up in Formative as a teacher. Yeah. And like, you know, this Monte, but a lot of the, you know, I've been in edtech, for a long time, again, worked for the KIPP schools, a lot of the assessment platforms I've used or or seen, it's a really tough process to like, edit a mistake that you made as a teacher, like a misspelling, and informative. It's not, as students are taking the test, you can fix that misspelling, and they'll get it in real time. If you Monte, like, wanted to you see your students making a particular misconception in the moment, and you wanted to add a question on the fly, you can do that while students are logged into that Formative. So I referenced that because I think we're you can you can check Formative out in a really low stakes way and not be afraid that you're going to make any sort of mistakes, right? Or be caught in one of those awkward moments in your classroom where you're having to explain something. So I'd encourage everybody honestly, just to try it. Just hop in the Formative ask your class a quick SEL check at the start of the day, ask them how they're feeling no, or play a trivia game with them. And Formative something that doesn't require you to upload a ton of content to see how it feels and learn about it themselves. Monte Woodard 31:12 Yeah, and it's, it's so so easy to I feel like the one area that I really love about Formative is just how easy it is to navigate, you know, even you know, I was playing around with question types. And even something as simple as the match table grid, which I've found in other platforms has just been super complicated, because I'm always like, what goes in the what goes horizontal? What goes vertically? And then I had to spend a lot of time, you know, previewing it to see if it works out. Right, but informative. It's laid out very well. Yeah. And I'm able to know exactly there. So definitely, you know, try it out. You know, it's a really great tool. And again, yeah, before my school upgraded me, I got sober for a pretty long time. And then I was like, alright, Can y'all just pay for it? But yeah, you, you know, I love that about Formative that, you know, we're really working to, you know, get it to get it to teachers for free, if they're able to, you know, just do a little bit of steps. So, Carlo Schmidt 32:04 yeah, there's actually a, there's, uh, if, if you may have seen this Monte. But if you go to our plans page, and you try to upgrade, if you even try to put in your credit card, we have this screen, I think that pops up that's like, hey, we don't want you to do this. Yep. You know, it's like talk, talk to our product team, like connect us with your admin, we will extend you can extend your silver for as long as you want. Just help us to continue the conversation at your school and with folks. And we'll keep giving it to you. So we put some friction in the way of people paying actually because we don't necessarily want them paying and believe that your school should be paying for the full product. Monte Woodard 32:40 Yeah, I remember when I was trying to upgrade to silver, you have to click No thank you. To the other day is like, it's like are you sure? Yeah, it's a little annoying. I love that. Thank you so much, Carlo. It has been you know, amazing talking to you about Formative and learning more about the features. Even as someone who feels like they knew Formative. I feel like I've learned a lot today. Carlo Schmidt 33:02 Monte, I can't thank you enough for having me today. It was a pleasure talking with you and learning how you use Formative and love all the work you guys are doing over at Modern Classroom Project, excited to learn how we can better support it. And thank you for this opportunity. Zach Diamond 33:16 Yes, and thank you both. Thank you Monte for agreeing to guest host this. This was fantastic. I learned a lot about Formative which I've actually never used before. So I'm gonna definitely have to give it a try. Because a lot of this sounds awesome, especially some of that SEL stuff. And also thank you to Carlo for joining us and telling us more about formative I agree with Monte I think that even an inexperienced formative user probably learned something new today. So thank you both so much. This has been fantastic. Carlo Schmidt 33:42 Awesome. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you, Zach Diamond 33:44 Listeners. Remember, you can always email us at podcast at modern classrooms.org. And you can find the show notes for this episode at podcast.modernclassrooms.org/136. We'll have this episode's recap and transcripts uploaded to the modern classrooms blog on Friday, so be sure to check there or check back in the show notes for this episode. If you'd like to access those. Thank you all for listening. Have a great week, and we'll be back next Sunday. Thank you so much for listening. You can find links to topics and tools we discussed in our show notes for this episode. And remember, you can learn more about our work at www.modernclassrooms.org. And you can learn the essentials of our muddle through our free course at learn.modernclassrooms.org. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @modernclassproj. That's p r o j we are so appreciative of all you do for students in schools. Have a great week and we'll be back next Sunday with another episode of the Modern Classrooms Project podcast.