Socrative - Not just another quizzing tool.

What is it?
Socrative is a FREE online tool that enables teachers to build formative and summative quizzes AND share and import them from other colleagues.  

I hear ya - "but you spoke about Quizlet a couple of posts ago - why are you showing us another quizzing tool?" I really believe that these two tools offer different things - I won't go into details here about what makes quizlet great you can read that post but I will tell you all about socrative and I think the easiest way to do that is to show you how it works. 

Go on then...
After signing up for a free socrative account, the first thing teachers see is the homepage ↓

At the top of the page is your unique room ID. This is the code you'll need to give students to access any material you make - one of the great things about Socrative is that students don't have to sign up for an account or put in their email address.  They just have to open up the student home page (https://b.socrative.com/login/student/) and pop in the room ID.

As can be seen in the image above there are six functions that teachers can utilise to make materials. I'll go through the first one in detail and provide a brief overview of the others.

QUIZ

This is the main feature on Socrative. Teachers can create quizzes on any topic they like... Teachers have lots of options over how they want to run the quiz - for example, it can be student-paced (so they can do it in their own time out of the class - YAY for autonomy) or teacher-paced (I imagine this works well for synchronous concept checking in class). Teachers can also choose if they want students to receive a score as the quiz progresses or right at the end, Wether to require names, shuffle questions/ answers and show a final score. 

Once the format of the quiz has been set up, teachers can choose from three question types: Multiple-choice, true/ false or a short answer - The last one allows the teacher to ask an open-ended question. 

Once the quiz has been completed, student get told their score and teachers can download a report or graph of results. 

 Student View

 Teacher View

Space Race & Exit Ticket
The Space Race is basically the quiz function but for teams -  students in groups compete against the clock 💣.  
The Exit Ticket is a way for teachers to get feedback. It automatically generates three questions. 
Q1. How did you get on?
Q2 What did you learn?
Q3 is a teacher-generated question, so you can choose anything - e.g What did you learn today? Do you like using Socrative? 

Unfortunately, I cannot embed the quiz I made here but if you follow this link and put in this ID WEBB5641 you can test out the one I made - AND test yourself on everything I have said so far ❤

I think this tool would be as great in the training room as it is in the classroom. Outside of the classroom, it provides the opportunity to promote and check learning. Inside of the classroom it can be used to make learning more fun, collaboratively and participatory 👊

The best thing about Socrative is that you can download PDFs of the quizzes you make - this means that your plan B (remember the one you mentioned in your lesson plan for if the technology fails) can be a paper-based quiz!

PDF of the Quiz I made

The worst thing about Socrative is when you use the short answer function - the answers are case sensitive. If the teachers put the answers as 'School' but the students write 'school' - they would be told it was wrong. 

I highly recommend watching Russell Stannard's video  for a full overview of how to set up a quiz on Socrative.

Thanks for reading, 
K

All images are taken from Socrative