Assessment using Socrative

I first heard about Socrative at a PD at the teacher's convention in Atlantic City and have since helped many teachers use it successfully in their classrooms. If you sign up for socrative, you can create free assessments. You can create tests that have different kinds of questions, like multiple choice questions, true/false questions and short answer questions.

Something that I really like about it is that you can add an explanation to appear after students answer each question. When students answer one question at a time, after they answer it, an explanation that you write will pop up. This is great for math classes because you can explain the right and answer and the reason why, this way students don't ask why they got it wrong. And then what's better is that they will move onto the next question using that explanation in their knowledge base.

You can have students take the assessment one question at a time on their own, or they can take it where they can answer the questions in what every order they choose (They could skip around questions and such). You can also have the assessment be teacher paced, where you can go through with the class question by question. This is great for guided practice.

Finally, you can have students play "Space Race." I like having Socrative randomly place my students into teams. Then, you put the race on the board so students can see their progress. Every time someone from the blue team gets a question correct, the blue pawn in the race moves forward a step. If a student from the blue team answers incorrectly, the blue pawn in the race doesn't move forward. The point is to have as many students on the same answer the questions correctly the fastest.

What I love the most about Socrative though is that you can see the students answer the questions in real time. In other words, if a student isn't even logged into the classwork, you can tell! If a student only answered one question all class period, you can tell. You can also say "Ok, Mike, you check your #4's answer again" and have him self correct.

Socrative is a great assessment tool. The only thing I've noticed is that it sometimes might a little buggy. Sometimes I'll have my students raise their hand and complain that it randomly logged them out. I haven't been able to tell if Socrative is the issue, or if my students are trying to pull a fast one on me because they are getting a lot of the questions wrong, so they think that by closing the tab, and raising their hand to complain, I'll allow them to redo those questions that they got wrong. In this case, I tell them I can see where they left and I tell them what question to start off at.

I wish there was a way to delete scoresheets on this though. I have used this so much and have so many archived, that if I have to look back at a students scores for whatever reason, it can get a bit confusing.