Socrative is a very easy to use student response system that requires two devices: one for the teacher, and one for the students. Students can respond from their cell phones or from a computer/netbook/laptop. This is similar to Poll Everywhere, except there is not a text messaging feature (which, in my opinion, is better--the last thing I need is to rack up charges on parents' cell phone bills).
I have a classroom set of netbooks, so students always use those for their responses. Currently, I have used it for my ACT Science Reasoning practice I give on Fridays (known as FACT Fridays, for "Friday ACT"). In Illinois, the ACT is a part of the PSAE, which is our state test for determining if we meet NCLB requirements. Before anyone gives me any guff for "teaching the test," let me just say that I don't--I teach the thinking skills necessary to be successful on the test. These thinking skills are the same ones my students need when designing experiments and analyzing data in my classroom. I wouldn't be doing this at all if this part of the test didn't require the type of analytic and critical thinking all students need to have anyway.
The day before a FACT, I create a quiz in Socrative that has the same number of questions as the passage we are studying, and enter in the answers. I do not write in the text for each of the answer choices; all I do is write in the letters (A,B,C,D or F,G,H,J) and then check which one is the answer. This process takes a total of 2 minutes tops.
When students come in and access their journal question for the day every Friday, this is what happens:
- Students answer the questions on the paper copy of the ACT practice passage I provide. This is so they can practice writing pertinent things on the passage, such as trend arrows and relationships between data. Since students get a paper copy on the actual test day, I want to simulate real conditions as much as possible.
- I start the Quick Quiz feature on my teacher laptop, selecting the quiz I set up the day before.
- Students then enter their answers into Socrative using the Quick Quiz feature. They enter your room number (which is always the same unless you change it) and their name, and then they enter the quiz. As students enter their answer for each question, they are immediately told if they have the right answer or not. How's that for immediate feedback? It saves me some serious time reviewing answers, and lets me spend time on the important stuff--such as talking about the thinking needed to answer the questions.
- As students are entering their questions into Socrative, I am at my laptop, checking out the results using the Live Results feature. Using the teacher interface, you can see who is taking your quiz, what question they are on, and how well they are doing (it tells you how many questions each student has correct out of your total number of questions as they take the quiz) as it is happening in real time. If students aren't doing so hot on a passage, this tells me I need to spend more time reviewing the thinking skills needed for this passage, or at least have a discussion about what went wrong when answering the questions.
- Students then answer a question about the passage on my journal page, usually involving what they thought was difficult.
- After I am done reviewing the passage in class, I then select to end the activity. When I do, it sends me a spreadsheet report to my email, which happens to be a Gmail address. When I open the e-mail, it gives me an option to open it as a Google spreadsheet (yes, please!), which is then preserved forever and ever amen in my Google Docs list. A screenshot of the list, which color-codes which questions students got wrong for easy tracking, is pictured below. I love this feature, because it allows me to save spreadsheets (I date them with the passage number, type, and date) so I can see my students' improvement over the course of the year.
As you can see, Socrative is a fantastic tool for formative assessment that allows you to see how students are doing as they are doing it. While I have used Turning Point response systems and Poll Everywhere before, I really enjoy how Socrative allows for real-time results that you can then keep in an easily accessible format. Oh, and did I mention that Socrative is free? And I mean totally free--there's not some stripped-down free version and then other paid versions that have the features you really need to use to make it an effective formative assessment tool. Any teacher that wants to get instant data on how their students are doing in order to plan for remediation and further learning needs to check out this great tool.
Below are some screenshots of the various features I use in Socrative; you can click on each image for a larger picture.
For some good overviews about Socrative and how to use it, see this article and this video tutorial.