Most posts in this Should I Use Tech for This? summer series land on one side or the other. Paper wins for note-taking. The Socratic seminar stays analog (although prep for it is more fluid). But formative assessment strategies? This one genuinely goes both ways. The right exit ticket ideas for teachers depend entirely on what you want to learn about your students and what you plan to do with that information. In this post, we’re breaking down the best uses of digital vs. paper assessment for checking for understanding, including a ten-year-old Google Forms trick that still works beautifully in my classroom today.
Table of Contents
Should I Use Tech for Formative Assessment?
If you’ve been following along with this series, you already know what we’re doing. We take one classroom task, ask the question, “should I use tech for this?”, and work through it for an intentional answer. Post 1 on digital note-taking vs. handwriting landed pretty firmly on paper. Post 2 on Socratic seminar strategies was more nuanced–analog for the seminar itself, tech for the prep sequence.
Post 3’s the one that goes both ways.
Formative assessment’s one of those areas where I can make a strong case for paper and a strong case for technology, and the answer depends entirely on what you’re trying to learn about your students and what you plan to do with that information. So instead of landing on one side, this post is going to help you figure out which tool fits which purpose. I’ll also give you some concrete exit ticket ideas and strategies you can use either way.
Why Formative Assessment Strategies Matter
Formative assessment is any check for understanding that happens during the learning process rather than at the end of it. It’s not a grade. It’s information for you and your students. It tells you whether to move forward, slow down, reteach, or celebrate. Done well, it’s one of the most powerful tools in a teacher’s toolkit because it makes instruction responsive rather than just sequential.
The problem is that most of us are moving fast. We’ve got standards to cover, schedules to keep, and thirty students in front of us at various points of understanding. So the formative assessment tools we reach for need to be practical, not just theoretically sound.
That’s what this post is about.
Paper Formative Assessment Strategies: Sticky Notes, Sorting, and the Power of Reading a Room
Let me start with paper, because I think it’s underrated in a world that keeps pushing us toward digital everything.
My go-to analog formative assessment is simple: a sticky note exit ticket at the end of class. Three things you learned today and one question you still have. That’s it. Students write them, peel them off, and stick them on the door on their way out.
I know the three-two-one exit ticket format is popular, and it works well. But I’ve found that keeping it to three takeaways and one question gives me exactly what I need without overwhelming students at the end of a class period. The simplicity’s the point.
Here’s what happens after they leave. I pull the sticky notes off the door and sort through them. Understanding. Understanding. Understanding. Misconception. Question. Understanding. Misconception. I physically sort them into stacks right there. It takes maybe five minutes, and what I end up with is a clear picture of where my class actually is. Not where I hoped they’d be after the lesson, but where they actually are.
At the start of the next class, I pull out those stacks. I share a few strong takeaways. I address the misconceptions directly and explain why they’re misconceptions. I answer a thoughtful question or two. Students are remarkably engaged by this, partly because they recognize their own thinking in what I’m sharing and partly because it signals that I actually read what they wrote. That matters to them more than we sometimes realize.
I want to share a specific example from my World Geography class this past year that shows exactly why this works. We were covering primary, secondary, and tertiary economic activities, and I collected sticky note exit tickets after the lesson. When I sorted through them that evening, I noticed a pattern: a meaningful number of students had written that secondary economic activities, manufacturing, were the domain of wealthier, more developed nations. The opposite is true. Tertiary activities, things like finance, healthcare, and professional services, tend to be concentrated in more developed economies. Secondary activities have increasingly shifted to developing nations.
It was a clear misconception, and upon reflection, not a surprising one given how much students hear in the news about bringing manufacturing back to the United States. But I caught it because of the exit ticket. I addressed it verbally the next day and documented it in our class unit document (more on that in a second). When we got to the final assessment, nobody in that class missed that concept. Not one student. That’s the power of catching a misconception early and addressing it directly.
Taking It One Step Further: The Unit Takeaways Document
This is something I experimented with in my World Geography class this past year, and it worked well enough that I’m planning to keep doing it.
The idea is simple. I maintain an ongoing document (I call it something like Unit Takeaways, Misconceptions, and Questions) and I post it in Schoology so students can access it throughout the unit. After I sort through the exit tickets, I select a few highlights from each category and add them to the document. Not all of them. Just the ones worth showcasing or addressing for the whole class.
I’m a slow typist, and I’m not going to sit there manually transcribing sticky notes. I open Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, snap a photo of the sticky notes I want to include, and ask the AI to type them up for me. It takes about thirty seconds. That’s a genuinely good use of AI. It handles the tedious part so I can focus on the instructional part.
The document ends up with three running sections. Key takeaways from the unit that I want students to have in their own words. Common misconceptions and clear explanations of why they’re wrong. And thoughtful questions from the class, sometimes with possible answers, sometimes left open for further discussion.
Students can refer back to this document as the unit progresses. It becomes a living record of the class’s collective thinking, and it gives struggling students a resource they might not have thought to create on their own.
Techy Formative Assessment Strategies: When Digital Formative Assessment Earns Its Place
Now let’s talk about where technology can truly transform the paper version.
Adaptive Google Forms Formative Assessment
I wrote about using Google Forms for formative assessment back in 2016 (I can’t believe that was a decade ago) and I’m still using this in my classroom. That it’s held up for a decade in an educational landscape that’s seen Covid and the advent of generative AI is its own endorsement.
Here’s what makes adaptive Google Forms different from a standard digital quiz. You can set up section branching so that the form responds to each student’s answers in real time. If a student answers a question correctly, the form moves them on to the next concept. If they get it wrong, the form routes them to a short tutorial or reteaching section, asks a follow-up question to check whether they’ve got it now, and then sends them back to try again. Students can’t submit until they’ve worked through every concept successfully.
This is checking for understanding that does something with the data immediately, without you having to be present for every student simultaneously. It’s personalized in a way that a whole-class reteach simply can’t be. I’ve linked to my full walkthrough of how to set this up here. As mentioned, the post is older, but the functionality still works exactly the same way, and the setup is worth the extra prep time for important concepts. I use one for each unit section in AP World.
Kahoot for Formative Assessment
Kahoot earns its place in my classroom for a specific, limited purpose: quick, low-stakes fact checks at the beginning or end of a lesson, especially when I’m introducing new concepts and want to see what’s sticking.
The key word there is quick. Kahoot is speed-based, which makes it fun for multiple choice and true/false questions where the answer is either right or wrong. It is not the right tool for anything requiring deeper thinking. If students have to analyze, evaluate, or construct an argument, the time pressure works against them and the frustration outweighs the engagement. Use Kahoot for what it does well: fast, gamified fact checks. Reach for something else when you need more depth.
Short Answer for Formative Assessment
If you’ve been reading this series, you already know I’m a fan of Short Answer for the way it handles peer writing analysis. It also works great as a digital exit ticket tool when you want more than a multiple choice answer but less than a full blown essay.
Students type a short response to an exit question, and Short Answer’s platform allows you to see and analyze those responses quickly. It can do things with student writing that a stack of paper exit tickets can’t: surfacing patterns, comparing responses side by side, and giving you a fast read on where the class is without having to physically sort through thirty slips of paper.
I’m actually so excited about what Short Answer is doing for classroom assessment that I interviewed its creator, Adam Sparks, for the If Teachers Ruled the World podcast. That episode drops on July 14th. Keep an eye out for it here or wherever you get your podcasts. I think you’ll get a lot out of it.
Digital Exit Tickets
I also sell a set of exit ticket templates through my site that come in both paper and digital formats. You can find those here. The digital versions can be assigned directly through your LMS at the end of class, which makes them zero-prep on the day of and easy to collect and review. The paper versions give you the sorting advantage I described earlier. Having both formats in your toolkit means you can match the tool to the moment rather than defaulting to one or the other out of habit.
So, Should I Use Tech for Formative Assessment?
let’s run this task through the Should I Use Tech for This? framework.
1. Can a student complete this task just as well (or better) without a device?
For basic exit tickets: yes. A sticky note and a pen give you everything you need to check for understanding, catch misconceptions, and plan responsive instruction. Paper works beautifully here, and the physical sorting process gives you something that scrolling through a spreadsheet of responses doesn’t, an immediate, tactile sense of where your class is.
But for adaptive, personalized feedback that reteaches in real time? No. A paper exit ticket can’t route a student to a tutorial based on their answer. That’s something technology makes possible that paper can’t replicate. So the answer here is: it depends. Which means we keep going.
2. Does this task require students to process information, or just record it?
Both, depending on the format. A sticky note exit ticket asking for three takeaways requires genuine processing. Students have to decide what mattered from the lesson and put it in their own words. An adaptive Google Form requires processing too, plus real-time reteaching if they’ve missed something. Even Kahoot, at its most basic, requires recall. Formative assessment done right is always about processing, regardless of the medium.
3. Does technology make this task possible, or just easier?
For adaptive Google Forms: possible. You can’t replicate real-time, personalized branching on paper. For Kahoot and Short Answer: genuinely different. The gamification and peer comparison features change what the task can accomplish. For basic digital exit tickets: easier, not necessarily better. A paper exit ticket and a digital one are functionally similar; the choice comes down to workflow and what you want to do with the data.
4. Does using technology here create a distraction risk that outweighs the benefit?
For focused, structured formative assessment tasks at the end of class, the distraction risk is relatively low. Students have a clear, time-limited task in front of them. This is not open-ended device time. It’s a specific prompt with a specific purpose. The risk is manageable here.
5. What do I want students to walk away with, and does tech help or hinder that outcome?
I want students to walk away having reflected genuinely on what they learned and what they’re still uncertain about. I want that information to make my instruction better the next day. Both paper and technology can serve that outcome well — the question is which tool gives me the data I need in the form I can actually use.
My answer for formative assessment: Both, intentionally.
The sticky note on the door isn’t a backup plan for when the Chromebooks are charging. It’s a legitimate instructional tool that gives you something technology can’t fully replicate. A physical, sortable, human record of your students’ thinking that takes five minutes to read and immediately tells you what to do next.
And the adaptive Google Form isn’t a gimmick. It’s a powerful tool for personalized reteaching that paper can’t match.
The right answer is knowing which one serves your purpose on a given day. Sometimes that’s a sticky note. Sometimes that’s a form that reroutes a struggling student to exactly the concept they missed. Often it’s both, used at different moments for different reasons.
That’s intentional technology use–the whole point of this series.
Next week, we’re moving on to Post 4: Research and Source Analysis. That one makes a strong case for technology. And I think you’ll find it a refreshingthe change of pace welcome after the past two posts of “it’s complicated.”
