Resource Name: Socrative

URL: http://www.socrative.com

Uses: Survey and Poll, Quiz Quickly, Read and Respond, Watch and React

Teacher Time Investment: IIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

   Student Learning Curve: III IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII   

Description: Socrative is a powerful assessment tool that enables creations of quizzes, surveys, and more. From the site:

"Socrative lets teachers engage and assess their students with educational activities on tablets, laptops and smartphones. Through the use of real time questioning, instant result aggregation and visualization, teachers can gauge the whole class’ current level of understanding. Socrative saves teachers time so the class can further collaborate, discuss, extend and grow as a community of learners."

Socrative allows both student paced and teacher paced quizzes, allowing teachers to either collect information in one quick assessment, or to individually send questions, allowing time for discussion in between.

Cool, right? So here's another video that goes into all of those features in a bit more depth:

Sample Applications for the Classroom:

• Assign a quick test as an exit ticket to bring closure to each day's lesson.
• Require that students answer a number of questions in conjunction with assigned reading for homework. This guarantees the likelihood that the reading gets accomplished, and you'll see from a quick glance at the results which portions of the texts created difficulties for the majority of the class.
• Use distributed questioning to monitor and adjust as new information is presented.
• Assess rote facts and skills in a fun way using the Space Race option. Good for assessing vocab words, dates, spelling words, parts of speech, quotes and their origins, or any other short answer topics. 
•  Check out Socrative Garden. It's a blog where great ideas and free importable lessons are shared for use with Socrative, such as this one on Thinking Routines and this one on Using Socrative as a Back Channel (a back channel is a virtual room or digital stream through which thoughts and questions are surfaced as a lecture or lesson takes place).  View hundreds of ideas at Socrative Garden.
• Check out this blog post where Jennifer Roberts shares "How I Use Socrative to Teach Writing."
• Finally, see this link regarding a database that contains over 1000 Socrative quizzes. 

Notes and Caveats:

• Allow yourself some time to get acquainted with the interface. It's surprisingly compact, without a lot of shortcuts.

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