Assessment Tool – Socrative

Socrative is an interesting assessment tool. Although there are limited features in its free version, it is adequate and effective to be used as an additional assessment tool to assess the students' understanding of what have been taught in classes. As expected, more features are available in the paid version.

Easy access for students, no sign-up, thus no login name and password to memorise. It just needs a room name which will be given by the teacher.

There are 3 types of questions that can be built in Socrative:
1) Short answer question.
2) Multiple choice questions.
3) True or False question.

(Here,I compare it with other assessment tool that I have used e.g: Quizziz which only caters for multiple-choice questions)

Variety of activities: quizzes, exit tickets and space races. 

Questions can be - a mix of short answer, multiple-choice and True or False questions.
Single Sign-On - Teachers can sign in using their Google Email Address
Drive Integration - Teachers can have reports (in excel, pdf or text format) sent to their Google Drive.

Supported Browsers and Devices
Socrative works on every browser: including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer. 
We can use any Web Enabled device: including Smartphones, Tablets, Laptops and Desktops Report Formats 
These reports can be e-mailed, downloaded or be sent to the Google drive.

Activities & Reporting
Multiple-choice, short answer and True/False questions, End of class Exit Tickets, Competition while playing games with Space Race. 
Class, Question and Student level reports (.xls for class reports, .pdf for individual and specific question reports).

The setting of this recorded video was in the IT room of Al Amin, Bukit Beruntung. Normally, because of our limited computers, students have to be grouped into 4 students per group. Each student in each group is assigned a number from 1 to 4. The student who has been assigned number 1 will answer question 1, those assigned number 2 will answer question 2, and so on. As everybody has tried out, the circle continues. The number 1 student will now answer question 5, followed by the number 2 student who will tackle question 6 and so on. This is to give equal hands-on experience to all. No worries…we will have more hands-on session in the near future. They can also try this at home later on. However, for this recording, I only recorded the same pupils answering all the questions to minimise the recording time.
We were doing the revision for Unit 4: Lunchtime. In this topic, we learned about food, drinks, fruit and vegetables. And this particular quiz is on Fruit. These students are again from Year 1 AF. Some students are familiar with the PCs, while some are not. Please ignore the background. I tried to make them converse in English as much as possible, but as you can see, they were more comfortable talking in their mother tongue language. 
Overall, I like Socrative and will definitely use it again and again to increase students' understanding of what have been taught in the class. As I am currently only teaching Year 1 students this year,  more sessions are needed. I must first make sure that they are familiar with the computers, understand basic terms used (such as "submit the answer") and many others. Everybody needs attention at the same time and thus it can turn havoc!
One other thing : the teacher must remember to launch the quiz or the space race or else the students will be waiting forever!

Below is the snapshot of the quiz. Once the students have submitted the answer,  they can receive just a correct or wrong response, or a short explanation on the answer.