Getting the most out of Socrative

Socrative lets you set up multiple choice or open ended questions which you can use to poll or quiz the class. You make your quizzes available one at a time through your room.  If requested, Socrative sends a comprehensive report on each student's performance to your registered email.

As with many hybrid tools it’s best if you can set them up and manage them on PC whether your students will be using them on iPad or PC. When you create an acct you are assigned a unique 6-digit room number. This room is where your students go to take your quizzes, which you deliver through your one room (so, one activity at a time).

On the PC students go to http://socrative.com and use the student login button. They don’t need an acct beforehand, they simply click the Student button and then enter your room number, and your activity will be pushed to them when you start it. 

On iPad there are a free teacher app and a student app.  The students run the student app and then JOIN your room number. I have found in my office that I have been unable to access my room as a student on an iPad though a PC in the same room can connect just fine, so iPad need for bandwidth is something to keep in mind.

A great affordance of Socrative is that teachers can share quizzes. When you opt to assign your quiz a SOCrative number, then others can import that quiz into their account and use it as if it were their own. That is, Socrative makes copies and stores them in each teachers’ account where each can push their copy of the quiz out through their room. Thus we can organize to prepare materials for a shared course, and use each other's materials.

To import a quiz into your account go to Manage Quizzes > Import Quiz > Import Shared Quiz

Insert the SOC-code number, and that quiz is yours to edit and use as you wish.

We have experimented with using Socrates in class and come up with the following recommendations

1.     When you set up quizzes, you can indicate correct answers or not. If having the students work individually in class, there is a pitfall. If you give correct answers as quiz feedback, then the student who attacks the question first might broadcast the answer to the rest of the class, and students don’t really do the exercise, as might happen when working from a book or paper handed out in class.

Solution, indicate only the first question answer as an example, but not the others. No student will then ‘know’ the correct answer and the exercise might be done with more integrity.

2.     Another approach is to go over the activity in some other medium and then run the Socrative Quiz as a SPACE RACE. In this activity, you indicate the answers to all questions, and the team space ship advances only when a correct answer is given.

I found using this approach that the competitive nature of the exercise suppressed cheating (though in some teams, one member did all the work).

Only ten teams are possible, so you might have to pair the students BEFOREhand. This can get complicated as our students don’t necessarily fall right into place, and in team members each might try to use his / her computer thus bumping other teams from the game, so take time to set up the activity, assign teams, and be clear what roles team players have.

I also found that in this format some students requested to review the exercise, so I re-ran it as a normal quiz. For the quiz each correct answer was indicated, so this time those who wanted to review were able to get feedback on their work (on their own, while I was free to direct the next class activity)

Socrative is reviewed, along with Kahoot, and FlipQuiz, here for their game components
http://www.edudemic.com/gamify-your-classroom-2 

And Rehab Rajab reviews a few apps, including Socrative, and lists sources where she replenishes her information on the topic here:
http://plato.iat.ac.ae/edtech/blog/myfavoriteipadapps/