Socrative

Socrative
Socrative is a free online resource that allows teachers to further engage and assess the activities the students undertake on laptops, tablets and Smartphone’s. 
This resource allows for real time questioning, gives visualisations to the questions and answers and allows the teacher to gauge the student’s current understanding of the topic. 
Socrative can also save the teachers time allowing them to engage with the students more. 

There are a number of ways to ask different questions using this tool, such as ‘quick questions’ that include multiple choice, true or false and a short answer question, picture to the right. These allow for quick and easy questioning. 
 You can also create a quiz that the students can complete on their device that has to be pre made.

The results of the sudent will show up on the teachers screen when the students submit answers to Multiple Choice, True/False, Graded Short Answer or Open-Response questions.

The teacher can also review the students understanding in a variety of ways: whole class overview, student specific results or question by question breakdown. All the reports can be downloaded, emailed at any time.

 I believe that Socrative can be a useful tool to use within the classroom, as mentioned above you can see the results of a question in real time, which can be beneficial as the students will need to know the answer.  Otherwise, if the question was given in an assignment or as homework then the students will have time to look the answer up, or may just copy and paste the answer, for example. 
It is also a good tool to use if you are teaching a class where the students are in different places, e.g. in a different country as all you need is an internet connection and the room number. 

Although, I feel that Socrative has some drawbacks.  For example, to use the resource you will need to be connected to the internet, which can cause some issues, e.g. the internet connection may be lost.
Also, if you are in a classroom with no computers and are relying on the students to have a Smartphone to use it, they may not have their phone or be able to access the internet on it.   

To summarise, Socrative has many benefits that can aid in teaching but cannot be relied on completely. 

I will be using Socrative in one of my future classes and I will post the results.

Socrative website.
Further information on Socrative.
A video that further explains Socrative and its features.