33 Digital Exit Tickets That Fit Most Subjects

Exit tickets (or exit slips) are a time-proven method of checking understanding in the classroom. Often, this means students write down (with pen and paper) a two-three sentence take-away summary of the day’s lesson and turn it in prior to exiting the class. It’s easily understand, requires little preparation, and is done in minutes.

Robert Marzano, classroom researcher and education author, shares four uses for exit slips. Students:

1. rate their current understanding of new learning
2. analyze and reflect on their efforts around the learning

….and teachers:

1. gain feedback on an instructional strategy
2. gain feedback about the materials and teaching

Technology provides a great opportunity to update this popular activity so it can be collaborative, shared, and published for the benefit of all. A few weeks ago, I published a Google Spreadsheet as a collaborative way for all of us to share our Exit Ticket suggestions. Here are 28 ideas from readers. I love the variety:

1. Use a virtual wall like Padlet to post the Big Idea of the day. This is shared with students and the teacher.
2. Read a teacher blog post and respond.
3. Access a Quizlet (or other) flash card deck and answer five summative questions. Repeat until students get them all right.
4. Post a question to a virtual wall about something the student didn’t understand. Answer the posted question of another student.
5. Tweet out the 140-character Big Idea of the day, using a unique #hashtag
6. Add a blog post with Five Fast Facts about today’s material
7. Add a blog post with 3-2-1: 3 questions student has; 2 things they have learned; 1 thing they want to know more about.
8. Draw a picture that summarizes today’s lesson. They might use a drawing program (like Paint), a photo editor (like PicMonkey) or a word cloud creator (like Tagxedo).
9. Use a whiteboard program (like Realtime Board) or a mind mapper (like Ideament) to brainstorm the lesson with a partner.
10. Add the Big Idea student took away from the lesson to a Google Spreadsheet or a Google Form.
11. Take a poll, selecting what student saw as the most important point in the lesson.
12. Add three pieces of prior knowledge required to understand the lesson to a collaborative mind map (like iBrainstorm).
13. Answer an open ended question posted by the teacher to a backchannel device (like Socrative).
14. Create a Voki to ask and answer a question about the day’s lesson. Upload it to the class website or another page required by teacher.
15. Take a screenshot of student daily notes; upload to Fotobabble and have the image discuss the notes for a brief time.
16. Use an infographic tool (like Piktochart) to create a timeline or storyline based on the day’s lesson.
17. Review project with a neighbor, based on a rubric.
18. Verify that a student’s neighbor saved a document correctly, to the student digital portfolio or class server.
19. Tack a post-it note to a board on the classroom wall with a tech problem they had while accomplishing today’s lesson (i.e., couldn’t get the sound to work).
20. Sign up for a scheduled presentation date before leaving class.
21. Line up in arrays (if you’re discussing arrays) or sets (if you’re discussing sets) before leaving class.
22. Record a 30-second audio summary of class (using a tool like Audioboom).
23. Use a whiteboard screencast program (like Educations or Screenchomp) to show how to solve a math problem.
24. Share the daily notes (taken in Google Docs or another shareable word processing program) with classmates.
25. During Hour of Code, take a screenshot of student program and share it with classmates on an ‘Hour of Code’ Discussion Board.
26. Students use the class Google Calendar to sign up for a project presentation date.
27. Add birthdays to an online calendar or one on the classroom wall.
28. To prepare for a tech project, provide students with a list of skills to be used (created in Google Forms or Sheets); have them check off all those they know how to use.

Need more? Here are more from ecolleague, Matt Levinson:

1. A 16-second video to post to MixBit, YouTube’s new video sharing tool
2. A tweet that boils down the essence of the class to 140 characters
3. A photo illustrating the key learning moment that can then be posted on a class Instagram account
4. A question posted to a class Edmodo account inviting a continuation of the learning outside of class

The beauty of exit slips is they put learning in students’ hands. They share knowledge and everyone grows. When you do it digitally, you remind students that technology is useful, exciting, and green.

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.