Following last week’s trial of Google Forms to run quizzes, this week I tried Socrative which takes a different approach to achieve the same result. Socrative is an online service available at http://socrative.com that according to the website “empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.” The teacher creates an account at http://m.socrative.com/lecturer/#lecturerLogin and is given a ‘room’ number, and can then make and save a quiz either on the webpage or via a dedicated app on a smartphone or tablet. During the class the teacher logs on and makes the quiz “live” and the students access it via a slightly different address: http://m.socrative.com/student/#joinRoom - this has to be done on different devices to that being used by the teacher.
The website takes you through the various options in an easy to understand way. The whole process of setting up is fairly painless, it only took me a few minutes to produce a test quiz. You can choose either multiple choice or text based answers; with multiple choice you can choose to display the correct answer to the student after the question if you wish, and there is also an option to randomize the order of the choices for each answer so that students do not all get the answers in the same order.
Quizzes can be run either at student pace (start it off and let them get on with it) or at teacher pace (you send them the questions one at a time, keeping the class all together and allowing discussion of the answers between questions). With the latter option combined with multiple choice questions you can display a live graph of the incoming answers on an interactive whiteboard, this proved popular with my students however some of the cannier ones waited to see what the popular answers from others were before submitting their own, so this feature is perhaps used with caution. Like Google forms there is the option of downloading a spreadsheet of results, useful for tracking progression.
So which is best; Socrative or Google Forms?
Socrative is slightly more visually appealing than Google Forms and feedback from my students (all aged 16-19) was positive, with a slight preference shown over Google Forms. However I think that the two systems are best used in slightly different situations. Socrative is really designed to be used ‘live’ in the class (some of my colleagues use it for ‘votes’ on verbal questions), you start and stop the activity and only one quiz can be running on your account at the time. Google Forms is better if you are setting homework as you can have multiple live hyperlinks to different forms, so different classes can use the system for different quizzes at the same time, or different learners in the same class (for example with different abilities) can access different versions of a quiz in the same class at the the same time, useful for differentiation.
Summing up Socrative
As usual, I would advise having a quick practice run-through of all of your quizzes before delivering them to students, just to be sure they behave as expected. For this you will need to have two devices though, not always possible. I certainly liked the ease of use and, like Google forms, will be using Socrative again in future.
But I do have one caveat; buried deep in the FAQs when I checked on Friday (under Teacher web-based solution) it says that:
“Socrative provides a free student response service for everyone, with no restrictions as part of our beta product launch. There is no registration fee, usage fee and no credit card details are required and no hidden catches.
Since we truly believe in customer collaboration we are here first to gather your thoughts, requirements, comments while we are working day and night to launch our turnkey product.
Don't miss this amazing opportunity to enjoy our product while they are free of charge!”
This implies that they do plan to charge to use the service in the future.
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