Socrative Computer Lab Activity

Socrative is a "student response system" that can be accessed by teachers and students online at www.socrative.com or via the free Socrative iDevice/Android apps. Socrative offers teachers varying levels of question types that require varying levels of preparation:

• "quick exercises" - the teacher asks students a question orally and students are given a simple multiple choice (A/B/C/D), true/false, or short answer option screen with which to select a response [this is similar to using clickers]
• quizzes - these can be prepared in advance, saved, shared, duplicated, etc. Quizzes can be self-graded and results compiled in reports.
• exit tickets - like quick exercises; can be created on the fly or in advance
• games - students race to answer questions prepared in advance

What I like about Socrative is that while teachers need to create a (free) account to use the service, students do not. Rather, students go to the website or open the app, then enter a "room number" for their teacher. One less user name and password for students to have to keep track of! 

I've used Socrative as a glorified clicker in my classroom (I usually have to pair students up because not everyone has a smartphone with which to access the web or app), but today I decided to have students access it through our computer lab. For this particular activity, I wanted everyone to be able to participate, and the activity required somewhat long short-response answers, so it was helpful for students to have keyboards.

Before class, I created a ten-question short-answer quiz on addition / time order sentence relationships. The quiz requires students to write a follow-up sentence to a given sentence, using either an addition or time order relationship pattern. Short answer responses can be set to auto-grade, but I did not use this feature.

I saved my quiz and enabled the share feature. This makes my quiz available to other teachers using Socrative. When you share a quiz, you also gain access to a spreadsheet listing all of the available shared quizzes, which you can then import and use yourself.

During our class time in the computer lab, I logged in to Socrative and projected my screen for the class. Students logged in using my room number. Quizzes may be given either student-paced or teacher-paced; I chose to control the pace on this quiz because I wanted to discuss each sentence example as we went along. During the quiz, students could see the quiz question and their own response on their screen; the teacher can choose to share responses in real time. Again, for this activity, I wanted students to see and discuss each other's work, so I projected student responses. (Responses are shown anonymously, but are posted in the order in which students sign in, so it is possible - with careful attention - to figure out whose responses are whose.)

Overall, this activity worked well. Everyone participated, and there were no real technical glitches. (We did have two screens freeze at one point, but a simple screen refresh fixed the issue.) Students liked being able to read each other's responses and seemed comfortable sharing, as there were no names attached to the answers. As the students got more comfortable submitting answers, they were quicker to respond and incorporated more humor and personality into their sentences. 

Following the quiz, I was able to download or email myself a quiz report with each student's responses, broken down by student and question/prompt. The information is presented in a spreadsheet, so I could actually go back and grade this, put comments on it, and give individual students feedback in that way. I don't plan to do that for this assignment, although I did notice some consistent errors and trouble spots as students were posting responses and I will review these in the report and address them in a future class.