SOCRATIVE

Overview

Socrative is a cloud-based student response system developed in 2010 by Boston-based graduate school students. It allows teachers to create simple quizzes that students can take quickly on laptops – or, more often, via classroom tablet computers or their own smartphones. That makes these devices a more robust replacement for special purpose “clickers.” “I can assess on the fly and best of all, students can use their portable media to provide me with near instant feedback,” writes one teacher blogger. “Clickers do this but the benefit of Socrative is that students do not have to buy anything and I do not have to spend a lot of time developing quizzes using any certain format.”

Quizzes can be true/false, multiple choice, graded short answer or allow open-ended short responses. Activities can either be teacher-paced (for use during a classroom discussion) or student-paced (for use as a more traditional class-end “exit ticket” or quiz). There’s also a gaming element: the “Space Race” feature can set up a quiz so that teams of students can compete against one another to launch rockets into space. Results can be displayed live in the classroom to facilitate discussion (with student identity kept anonymous) – a “nifty way of using formative assessment to further students’ learning” – while teachers can access detailed classroom and student data on their own devices. Socrative quizzes can also be shared with other teachers; as of mid 2013, Socrative had built up a library of 315,000+ quizzes that any teacher could use. EdSurge’s own former teacher-in-residence Jennie Dougherty raves both about the tool and about how Socrative’s blog gives teachers step-by-step suggestions for how to use the tool in their classrooms.

Socrative officials say more than 350,000 teachers have registered for free accounts, and that more than 1700 districts or schools count at least 20 teachers as users. Those teachers are pretty active: they’ve mandated 6.2 million student logins in 2012 alone and asked 122 million questions to date.

If you want to play the quiz I made you can click here.