Here are my reviews of different apps that can be used in the classroom, particularly for math. If you have used any of these apps before, please post a comment letting me know your thoughts about the app or different ways to use it for educational purposes. Thanks!

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Socrative (Teacher & Student)



Price:  Free

Purpose/Capabilities: 
The Socrative app has the same capabilities as the website.  There is a teacher version of this app and a student version of this app.  The teacher can create quizzes, exit tickets, or space race games for students to complete on the learning goals for the lesson.  It allows teachers to create both multiple choice and short answer questions.  It can be anonymous, or the students can be asked to fill in their name.  It can be used to quickly and easily assess students for content knowledge of any topic.  The teacher can run a “teacher-paced quiz” where student have a limited time to answer a question, then everyone goes to the next question, or a “student-paced quiz,” where students can have as much time as they need to complete each question.  

Positive Aspects: 
 Socrative is a quick and easy way for teachers to get real feedback on how well their students understand a particular topic.  The students generally like using this app because they can complete the questions without feeling insecure, since the other students in the class will not know their responses.  I use the quiz feature most often because it will create an Excel spreadsheet of the data from the class’s responses.  I mix up both multiple choice questions and short answer questions.   The teacher can program correct responses for multiple choice questions which will appear in green on the spreadsheet and wrong answers in red to make it easy to assess.  These assessments can be made ahead of time and can be as long or short and as general or specific as the teacher wants.

Negative Aspects: 
 There is no math type in Socrative, so it is hard to type in some equations.  In addition, I have had one or two instances where the student version of the app did not work for all my students during class.  In this case, I had them go to the website; it just took longer for them to get there.  There have been updates as recently as three days ago, so hopefully this has been fixed.

Overall, I love this app and website for the classroom.  It is an excellent way to informally (or formally) assess student understanding quickly and efficiently.  You have immediate feedback on how your students are doing before you move on to a new topic.

No comments:

Post a Comment