Using Socrative for Real-time Formative Assessment

Hey everyone! I did not get the chance to attend any Pro-D workshops this week due to travel. I’m going to London! So although I was not able to check out any of the workshops, I will be creating lore for my students during my time abroad. Hopefully not ‘losing my passport’ type of lore, but all the other good stuff (solo travelling as a type B is scary!!!)

Instead of reflecting on a pro-D activity, I wanted to explore a tool called ‘Socrative’ that I have been meaning to check out.

Essentially, Socrative is polling app where you can make formative quizzes/assessments for your students, and you can see their answers in real time. The app shows a breakdown of all student answers, with their overall mark; they also show class-wide percentages and breakdowns. When the assessment is done, teachers can export the results to an excel file for documentation.

Video from Socrative’s site: https://www.socrative.com/

I feel that this would be a really interesting tool to try out, as real-time formative assessment is a hugely important aspect of teaching practice, especially for my teachable subject area of science. Vocabulary-heavy classes such as biology and chemistry require a good understanding of how students retain and understand terms, and this tool would be very helpful in these settings. I also really like that it can be easily documented, as real-time traditional polling with a thumbs up/down method, for example, cannot be feasibly recorded. However, excel files would likely have some student personal data storage concerns. Inputting student names into the tool would also be a consideration that you would need to bring up with a technology coordinator at your school. As an educator, we need to be aware of these privacy concerns before using technology like this, even if it is a really exciting tool!

Let me know if you have ever seen Socrative being used in schools, or if you see yourself utilizing this tool in the future!

I’m off to go try and see if my british accent will fool any of the locals 😉

Until next time,

Rylie