Hi everyone,
I spent some time looking into Formative for my A1 — feel free to check out my thoughts here.
This isn’t the company’s first appearance in ETEC 522. Allan Carmichael did an A1 on it last year, and Christopher Wong wrote about CEO Craig Jones in 2018.
Having said that, Formative just received a $70M minority growth investment this week.
I think it’s a good time to take another look…
Hi Lyon,
Interesting and new-to-me product.
The business model, the specificity/simplicity of the product, and the founding story reminds me of padlet.
With the intuitive interface, and free option, I expect it saw a surge in use over the last year and a half, despite similar products on the market.
I love these smaller, fit-for-purpose, low learning curve technologies in education. I can see how this software might complement face-to-face delivery (in a classroom where students each have mobile learning devices) and remote teaching. I think that dashboard overview of student submissions might be an enhancement over some of the competition you mentioned- particularly if you can filter/view more analytic data for multiple activities across different periods of time to look for patterns. (and in the future, it would be neat if the system could analyze the data and make recommendations to the teacher and student.)
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the read Sally!
Yes — completely agree with you on the “fit-for-purpose” point. I’d rather have a learning tech do something well than one that tries to do everything.
Your mention of Padlet is interesting because both platforms essentially make collecting student ideas easy — this frees up instructors to think more about how to unpack and assess responses rather than worry about delivery…