Ever needed a quick and easy way to get your class (regardless of age) engaged and at the same time measure their uderstanding of the topic at hand? Perhaps you’re a class with personalised learning and want a way to pre-check your students that may demonstrate mastery on a particular topic so you know whom to send off for independant study.
Whatever your need Socrative is one of many readily available quizzing options out there. I’ve picked this one out in particular after reccomending an article to my former colleauge and friend David Leech who in turn picked this out as a trial piece of software to be used as one of our (now rebranded) Learning Tools to offer within our team.
Owned by popular American student management gurus MasteryConnect, Socrative comes in two flavours with a great free version for those that want to try it out with their respective groups. The whole system is cloud based and allows students to connect to your virtual “classroom” through a web browser, or by dedicated student app on Android, iOS or in the Chrome Web Store. There is also a teacher app for each platform if you’d prefer to go mobile yourself too.
Creating quizzes is as simple as clicking a button, naming your quiz and – If you’re an American school – you also have the option to align your quiz to a subject, grade and standard should you wish for the marks to count towards student grades. After that, you have 3 types of questions to choose from: Multiple Choice (minimum 2 to very large, possibly unlimited amount of choices), True or False or a Short free text answer (with the option for a specific keyword to be the correct answer).
Once you’re done, hit Save & Exit to prepare your new quiz for use with your students.
Once you have your students in your space, allow them to connect to your virtual classroom conataning your quiz using your uniquely generated code, that is displayed at the top of every webpage and can be accessed under “Rooms” on the Teacher app.
You then have a choice, you can eionsther launch a standard quiz and watch the results come in live, or you can make a game out of it and use Socrative’s fun “Space Race” feature (I won’t spoil the surprise). These results can then be saved and exported for your own use.
Going pro allows you to expand on this experience, with mutliple classroom codes, the ability to restrict access to students via ID numbers, more students in each classroom, the ability to link into gradebook systems such as SIMS or via an LMS and many more.
If you’d like to give it a try, please follow the links on the right for the platform(s) of your choice and for those that have used it before, what did you think to it? Did you go Pro in the end or has the free version made any impact in your classroom (whatever the setting)? Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments box below.
Mike
