I found out about Boom Learning over the summer, and it has been easy to incorporate into lessons with my students. There are two main reasons why I signed up for it. First, is that grading and data collection is so easy… meaning that it does it for you!! I just love the data that is automatically collected.
While a student plays a Boom deck, he/she is given instant feedback whether they got the item correct or not. If correct, a green box appears in the corner that says, “Correct!” and chimes. If the item is incorrect a red box appears that says, “Incorrect.” with Whoops sound. If the item was incorrect they almost always get to correct it before going on (depending on the type of activity they are doing). After he/she has completed the Boom deck, the progress reporting below is accessible to both teacher and student.
Let’s take closer look at the graphs that are available after the student has a Boom session.(If you click on the photo below, a larger version of it will pop up so you can see it better).
reports and above is what you see for a particular student. The top graph shows green for items that were correct, and red box shows where the student made an error.
If you click on the red box that the student got wrong, below is the next screen which will pop up.
This screen shows the actual item. Note the correct answer is in the box on the table. However, the thin white bar above says, “Student typed 65.” It is great to see the actual item and what his wrong answer was so you can analyze why he got it wrong. Pretty cool, huh?
In the picture below you can see the blank area in the center of the screen. Instead of green or red boxes across the screen there is a blank section in the middle. What that means is the student didn’t complete that item yet. Reasons could that it was skipped, or that the student didn’t finish the whole deck and that item hasn’t been done yet. Many times the author will intend for the deck to be played in random order, so that is why there might be blank spots here and there.
Here is a video that goes into gives more information on student reporting using Boom Cards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekBcPIdcvFo
The second reason I signed up for Boom Learning was that it is easy to make my own decks and customize them for students in different grades (I work with kids birth-age 21 with disabilities that affect them all differently). Kids love getting instant feedback and beating prior scores. But that will need to be discussed in a future blog post.
