Sunday 3 March 2013

Free clickers

Socrative

Socrative is a Student Response system, like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  The advantage of Socrative over other solutions is that it is free, and uses no special hardware.

To set it up you...

Go to www.socrative.com and create an account.  You get a room number allocated, but can change it (I’ve got room 9 0000 000).  That is all the set up you need.

To use in a lesson, you simply go to t.socrative.com.  You can do this on your laptop, but it is also designed  to be used on a phone / tablet.

Once there (and logged in) the laptop / phone screen looks like this. The easiest things to do are the Multiple Choice, True/False or Short Answer options.  You do not type the questions in, you simply ask the students orally, or have the question on the board, as we always do.

The difference comes with how students respond.

They go to m.socrative.com, on their phones / ipod touches / any other internet enabled device.  They can do this having connected to the school “JBSGuestwifi”.

When you ask a question, they simply get an A to E option on their screens.  As you can see there is no question or context, all they do is click A, B, C, D or E. 

Once they vote, a bar chart appears on your device.

I’m sure I’ve made it sound more complicated than it really is.  I discovered this site on Thursday (I was looking for something completely different), and had it running with students by my first lesson on Friday.



As you can see you can also have an “Exit Ticket”.  This is like the “Post-it note on the way out”, except I get an email with a summary.  I used this with Y13, and it illuminated a problem I hadn’t already spotted, so my starter for next lesson is sorted.  There are 4 parts to the exit ticket; name, how well did you get it (4 point scale), what did you learn, and answer the question on the board.

I’ve yet to play with the Quizzes you can write, but will share more later.

Downsides—not all students have phones.  They can pair up, or work in groups.  The exit ticket allows students to pass the device to their neighbour for them to submit.

Some students just opted to use their 3G rather than the school guest wifi.


Just to pre-empt the conversation we have a very clear policy on phones in class / school.  They are absolutely banned / not allowed, unless I decide to let my students use them for a valid educational reason, and thne it is on my terms.  I know it is not the same everywhere, and would suggest to anyone who works under a complete ban that they take the case for teacher choice to school leadership.