Monday, November 5, 2012

Tech Tips: Socrative

Tech Tips
Issue 4 


This Tech Tip will look into a time saving assessment tool.  Socrative is a great way to engage your students while assessing their learning.  It can be used in many ways: formal assessments, quick formative assessments, or even voting for items.  This is available on the computer as well as the iPads or any device with Internet access. 



What is Socrative?
Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.

Engage Students!
Socrative is an alternative to paper pencil testing.  Students are engaged while taking a student paced or teacher based assessment.  They are interacting with the ipad (or computer) and can see their progress (if you turn on this setting) as the assessment is taken.

Quick Overview:
Teachers and students can use Socrative on any device with a web browser (tablets, smartphones, laptops, iPod Touches, etc.).

1.        Teachers login at t.socrative.com by entering their email and password.
2.       Students login at m.socrative.com (or the iPad app) by entering the "virtual room number" provided by the teacher. Students will then see "Waiting for teacher to start an activity...".
3.      Teachers initiate an activity (e.g. Multiple Choice, T/F, Quick Quiz).
4.       Students respond on their devices.
5.      Students' results are visible on the Teacher's screen or sent in an email.

What Are the Benefits of Socrative?

For Teachers: This is a very easy tool to assess learning.  The program grades students’ responses and gives the teacher an individualized score.  Also, if teachers work with other teachers they can share created quizzes (as easy as sharing a number on the grade level Google Doc I shared with grades 1-5) and have access to many other quizzes.  Through this collaboration many assessments can be used without having each teacher creating their own.

For Students: Students are often more engaged with technology.  They can see in real-time how they are doing and there is istant turn-around in grading.
Create an account and get started:  http://www.socrative.com