FTT -Socrative

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Technology Enhanced Formative Assessment with Socrative

@joe_edtech

This topic is much bigger than this relatively short blog post. However, virtually every successful 1:1 teacher I've talked to says the same thing. The ability to use the technology to weave formative assessment into the classroom frequently and relatively seamlessly helps lead to increased student achievement.

Scholars Ian Beatty and William Gerace (2009) believe so strongly in the research behind technology-enhanced formative assessment that they built their entire pedagogy on it (click here for the full article). They wrote that the classroom should not only be student based, but also assessment based, and that formative assessment should be used to:

1. Motivate and focus student learning with question-driven instruction.
2. Develop students’ understanding and fluency with conversational discourse.
3. Inform and adjust teaching and learning decisions.
4. Help students develop metacognitive skills (see full citation below).

Socrative, a free, online, classroom response system can help you accomplish the goals outlined by Beatty and Gerace above. Once you go to Socrative.com and create your free account, you have several options for interacting with your students:

You can create a quiz in advance, and lead your class through it as graphical displays of responses appear on the screen, or you can put the students in groups and have them work at their own pace. You can also create questions on the spot or use the "Space Race" (students square off against one another in teams) to add a competitive gaming element to the classroom. At the end of the activity, you can get a report of how each student did on the quiz.

Socrative's brief video tutorial is embedded below:

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Reference:
Beatty, I. D., & Gerace, W. J. (2009). Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-Based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology. Journal Of Science Education And Technology, 18(2), 146-162.