Socrative
is a simple, dynamic online student response system that can help teachers
spark conversation and learning through user-created polls and quizzes. With
this free software, teachers can engage their classrooms through a series of
educational games and exercises via smartphones, tablets, and laptops. It is a
student response system, so the only person in the class who needs an
account is the teacher. Students can easily join a room without
having to log in. As I mentioned the teacher creates the room and gets a room
number, the students will join using that room number. Once everyone is in the
room the teacher can ask questions and the students can respond in many
different ways. Basically, you can manage the quiz by sign up to make a
quiz, or take a quiz by clicking student login on Socrative.com.
How Can Teachers Use It?
Once a
quiz is created in Socrative, you can then administer it at a controlled
pace or allow students to go at their own pace. Teachers can display the
class's responses to multiple-choice, true/false, or short-answer questions. In
addition to polling students on a single question, teachers can also create
longer quizzes, which the software grades. If you want to provide immediate
feedback, including explanations for wrong answers, there's an option to do
so. Quiz results land in an Excel spreadsheet, which you can download or
receive via email.
How Can Students Use It?
For a
student, they need to go to m.socrative.com. When they get to the website it
will ask for a room number. When a student joins a class, this is what they
will see until the teacher picks a type of question to ask. When a question is
asked, there is no question to read just choices or a place to type in their
response. That is pretty much it for students. It's very simple and easy to
utilize as a student.
Just like other softwares, there are some considerable pros and cons of Socrative.com.
Pros:
- Easy to use, very simple and flexible that users just need to sign up & no student registration is required.
- Great for review and quick assessments, and students can see their grades right away if they are using quizzes.
- Gives teachers the option to create quality quiz-type content.
- It helps a quiz-happy teacher & go paperless.
- It works on most any Web- or app-enabled device.
- Can import and share others' quizzes by inserting their SOC-#.
- It's a free tool!
Cons:
- Needs more import options such as uploading questions from Microsoft word, moodle, or other question generators.
- It will be great if there were more variety of games.
- No collaboration.
Conclusion
I
do love technology, and it is because that technology brings something new
to a classroom that was impossible before. It can be very helpful or
sometimes makes no difference, however, this student response system "Socrative.com" is definitely a
helpful tool because students can simply use any device to log onto a website
and respond to questions in real time. It is a nice service. It will be a great
way to review or start and finish a lesson for both teachers and students.
