Socrative

SOCRATIVE
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Socrative.com is definitely my favourite tool. It allows you to quiz your students in various ways, while you keep track of their progress.

Just recently I started teaching Dutch. As I'm only trained as an English and biology teacher, this doesn't come easily. I don't have a book and my students don't have laptops. They do have their own books, but consider them incredibly boring. Given they need to catch up quickly, I decided to go down another road. For a week straight, I developed tons of online material for them to practise with. Within a week (without any homework!) they were all ready for the exam and the average grade shows they truly understood. I find formative testing the best way to check students' understanding, and Socrative has been my main tool for this purpose in the past week.

In Socrative, you set up your own classroom with a unique code. After you've set up your classroom, you can create and start quizzes. Creating a quiz is done easily. You can choose to ask multiple choice, short answer or true/false questions. You can use as many characters in a question as you want and choose to make multiple answers correct.

After you've created your quiz, you can start it at your dashboard. Here, you can choose to do a space race (in teams) or a regular quiz (individual). Now comes the most beautiful part: Whatever students do and answer, is shown in a clear results table on your own screen. You are provided with the score of each individual student, as well as their progress and the percentage of students that answered the question correctly. This doesn't only give you insight in how each individual student is performing, but also which kind of questions are considered difficult.

I asked my students I've been teaching Dutch for feedback. No one disliked the assignments and the majority felt completely ready for the exam. I asked a couple students if they missed the book; they laughed at me. "Of course not!"

Requirements
- Internet connection
- Laptops/tablets/phones

Pros
- Very easy to use
- Many possibilities
- Great feedback for you and your students
- Support collaborative work

Cons
- You can only run one quiz at a time
- All your quizzes are attached to your classroom. They can be shared, but that takes a bit more time.

Have you ever used Socrative? Please leave a comment!

Any suggestions for another ICT tool? Please let me know!

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