Socrative is a quiz-based, formative assessment tool with multiple features that can enrich teaching and learning. Teachers can design quizzes, space races (picture being at the county fair and squirting water at a target to move a horse across the field…just like that but for quizzes!), exit tickets, and more to collect and analyze student data in real-time to make on-the-spot teaching changes and improve student learning.
Access: Socrative can be accessed on the top three operating systems: Windows, Apple, and Chrome. No downloads are required. A web browser that utilizes HTML-5 is needed to access all functions. Socrative is also usable on various hardware: desktops, smartphones, tablets, and mobile phones.
Workflow: There is a moderate time investment needed to become proficient with Socrative. After creating a free account, teachers are automatically given one public room. The public room is, essentially, a virtual meeting place for teachers and students. Unfortunately, a public room cannot accommodate a class roster. In order to track student activity within a public room, students must first enter the name of the public room, followed by their personal name.
Within a public room, teachers can create a quiz, search for a quiz, copy a previous quiz, edit quizzes, and more. Question types can be multiple choice, true/false, or short answer, and question order can be shuffled for each student. While images can be uploaded to a quiz, there is no support for audio or video files.
Accessibility: While Socrative does not directly accommodate learners with special needs, the website and app can work in concert with screen-magnifying and screen-reading software programs.
Equity: Socrative provides an opportunity for all students – regardless of level – to track and understand their progress. This may serve to improve equity in education, as teachers can hone in on students (or groups of students) that are challenged by learning the content. Teachers can customize lesson plans and quizzes based on feedback provided by Socrative's report functions.
Math: A third grade teacher has taught his first lesson on fractions. Some of his students seem to be perplexed on the notion of fractions being parts of wholes. Before delving further into content, he provides his learners with a Quick Question so that he may adapt his lesson to address the needs of his challenged students.
Health: After a lesson on scrutinizing food labels for glucose, sodium, and fat content, students enrolled in a health class have been assigned to teams. Their health teacher launched a Space Race quiz so that teams can determine the overall nutrient value of various food products. The team who can complete each question correctly within 20 minutes wins the race.
Community Organizing: A community organizer has assembled citizens of a U.S. census tract that has experienced disproportionately high rates of lung cancer. A developer has petitioned the local government to build a waste incinerator within the census tract's borders. After the community organizer's presentation on the health and economic impact of waste incineration on other communities, she invites citizens to access Socrative's Exit Ticket feature. Exit Ticket will allow the community organizer to address any lingering questions or misconceptions before the next event.
The site requires all teachers to create a free account.
Complete the "get account" web page.
Socrative will send new users an e-mail establishing the account.