ELT Tech Tools Blog: Socrative

 Little Things Make a Big Difference

Source: www.teacherstore.de

A new trend

As the tool we are about to discuss in this post depends on mobile devices, let's have some research and experiences' insights into the use of mobile in ELT. Does your institution allow students to use mobile phones? It could be a question to think about. In Sudan, we are strict about the use of mobiles in classrooms and it's a common policy which is well justified. "It is still common for schools to ban mobile phones in the classroom (and there are good reasons for this), but this will become increasingly difficult as learners use their phones for more and more tasks" (Walker & White, 2013). Their claim is that teachers can make use of their learners phones to enhance learning through drill and practice tasks as well as looking up information tasks. They also suggested that to enable Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL), teachers have to trust their students and accept the fact that students can be creative by using mobiles. A national MALL project, with UK and local partners, has been launched in Bangladesh to run for nine years (2008-2017). The English in Action (EIA) project aims to rich twenty-five million Bangladeshis. Surprisingly, the project isn't only using smartphones, but also Nokia basic phones with SD cards. It is clear now mobiles can help and Socrative is one of the tools that you can use in your classroom.

Why Socrative?

First of all, this handy tool is super easy to use as we will see. The website has made it easier for both students and teachers by providing an app that can work on Android and Apple devices (see Android Apps or App Store) but actually it's not a must since you can do whatever you want by navigating on the website which enables you to use the same features in the same way.  In addition, it offers a quick formative assessment toolkit which is based in three types of questions: multiple choice, true/false and short answer questions. If you have a few extra minutes and are not sure what to do, you can use a Socrative quiz as a good break while reflecting on previous activity(ies). Moreover, You can use it to ease scaffolding. Say you are teaching writing a letter, you can design a simple true/false quiz that guides the learners to the components of letters, why they are used and how they are structured. Another use which is very helpful for my classroom (which consists of forty or more students) is polling or getting immediate insights from all the members. Here is an example of a quiz I made to review a communicative lesson, recognising digressions in lectures (on student's screen).

And here what I am seeing on my PC screen, which can also be seen from a mobile phone as well.

How to get started?

- Go to http://www.socrative.com/ and choose TEACHER LOGIN. You can get a free account or use your Google account to login directly if you have one.

- Once logged in, Socrative gives you a room code that you will share with your students. Students won't need to register but they must type their names and the room code.

- You will also be able to see a dashboard where there are four options: Start a quiz to publish a quiz you've already prepare,. Quick question is used for polling, scaffolding or warm up, Space race for a group-based competition and Exit ticket which is a three general questions checking how much they learned in that specific session.

- On the top left hand corner, exist three tools: the Dashboard (shown on the picture above), Manage quizzes and Live results. Let's suppose we clicked on manage quizzes.

- As you can see, there are four options again: Create quiz, Import quiz (if you want to use another Socrative teacher's quiz or if you downloaded Socrative Excel, filled it with a quiz and want to upload it), My quizzes (to duplicate, edit, delete or download a previous quiz you've created) and Report (provides reports of students performance on quizzes). Let's go to Create quiz.

- The screen above shows how a multiple choice question is edited. You can add a picture or provide feedback on the explanation bar. It's easy to work with the true/false and short answer questions as well.

Final comments

You can publish your quizzes on students' pace or your own pace. The flexibility of this tool is really considerable, however, we should also consider a few things if we want to use it. First, Do all my students have mobile phones and access to the internet? It will just ruin the activity if you try it with some students and leave the others. Secondly, you will not be able to get detailed answers. A multiple choice question is restricted to the options you have suggested, so are true/false and short answer questions. This may limit students' creativity so it is worth thinking about what to use it for. Finally, if you are using Socrative with more than one classroom, there is a possibility that students from other classes use it since the room code you use is the only one. This can be a disaster if you are doing the same lesson later with that class in addition to the fact that students can use any name to login since no password is required. If you take these issues into account, together with the content of the quizzes and polls, you will admire it. If that is the case, please leave a comment about your experience.