Socrative: A Time-saving Formative Assessment Tool

🤔   What kind(s) of formative assessments (FA) do you have at school?

🤔   How do you usually keep track on students’ overall learning? 

🤔   Do you mark the papers manually and type the scores into an Excel?

🤔   Do you have difficulties in assessing students’ English proficiency in a 

       fun, interactive, efficient and effective way?

If you have got YES from one of the questions above, here we have💡 Socrative💡 !  

How Socrative Works?

Distinctively, Socrative is a FREE online formative assessment tools for English teachers to consolidate students’ knowledge and skills in particular vocabulary, grammar, reading comprehension and self-reflection. It comprises face-to-face quizzes, quick polling, friendly group competition (i.e., Space Races) and immediate feedback (i.e., Exit Tickets). Moreover, it supports both Android and iOS systems which can be run in the computers, iPads, iPods and smart phones. If you want to further the features and functions of Socrative, you can download its comprehensive guide here.

(Source: YouTube )

Friendly reminder: Press FULL SCREEN before watching the clip 😉

Interesting Pedagogical Facts / Positive Comments of Socrative

1.     Feasible use in ESL/EFL classrooms:

¬  NO SPECIAL TRAINING is needed for English teachers and students.

¬  Both website and Apps distinguish users from STUDENT LOGIN and TEACHER LOGIN. Students need not create an account, but simply type in the Room Number.

2.     Higher learning motivation and classroom engagement:

¬  ALL students can complete the quizzes individually or collaboratively.

¬  Space Race (Figure 1) promotes collaborative learning: 

  The whole class can be divided into utmost 20 small groups. Students can acquire knowledge and/or consolidate English four skills by negotiating meaning, achieving consensus and reading the post-explanation of respective question.

¬  You can embed visual cues and prompt feedback (i.e., preset explanation of the correct answers) along with the quiz questions in advance (Figure 2).

(Figure 1 - Space Race)

(Figure 2 - Add visual cues on left top and type explanation for each question)

3.     Detailed classroom data

¬  You can keep a CLOSER track on students’ real-time learning progress by identifying their names, percentage of answers, total scores and the 3 pre-set formative assessments questions from the Exit Ticket. The 3 pre-set FA questions include:

        (1) MC - How well did you understand today’s material?;

        (2) Short questions - What did you learn in today’s class? ;

        (3) Any teacher’s questions.

¬  Students’ overall performance can be shown immediately on your tracking device. Meanwhile, both teachers and students can obtain a report for every quiz question in PDF format.

Limitations

1.   Scope of grading system: Socrative is a robotic tool which can only facilitates teachers in marking absolute answers, such as MC and True-False questions. It should be noted that you need to check every single short question carefully and discuss in class.

2.   Question diversity: As mentioned earlier, Socrative is designed for quick quizzes. In other words, if you want to keep a record of students’ writing skills and styles, Socrative may disappoint you for not providing long question or essay-type quizzes.

3.     Limited access of Socrative functions: Unless the school upgrades the tool to Socrative PRO, or else you can only conduct one private or public quiz room with 50 student capacity at a time.

4.   One tool cannot fit all: You cannot embed any audios along with the questions, implying Socrative may not be a wise option for listening or pronunciation-related activities. Meanwhile, to some extent students with auditory learning styles may not be catered effectively in the quizzes. To maximize the use of Socrative, perhaps you can choose Teacher Paced (i.e., teacher controls the flow of quiz questions and monitor students' responses) in addition to the use of Window Media Player  in the listening or pronunciation-related activities.

5.    Teachers’ presence: Despite having the room number, it seems that quizzes can only be launched when both teacher and students are online simultaneously. Perhaps Socrative can further develop the system by enabling teachers to accept students’ quiz request.

HEY! I hope YOU have gained some inspiration after BLOGGING my second post!

💭  What are your instant thoughts and feelings towards 💡 Socrative💡? 

Please feel free to 💬 / ✍  / 📧  below!

More updates will be available next week! Have an insightful Friday to all ELT teachers! 😄

Triptico Plus: a Welcome Addition Game-like Tool in ESL/EFL Classrooms

Given the unprecedented demand for interactive whiteboards (IWB) in an ESL/EFL classroom, it seems that game-like tools are a kind of “edutainment” (i.e., education + entertainment) which become a prevalent pedagogical approach for worldwide teachers to stimulate teaching and learning motivation, as well as enhance learners’ language proficiency. 

Interactive whiteboards
(Source: Google search)

If you are looking for interactive, user-friendly and versatile language activities,💡 Triptico Plus 💡  (TP) is certainly one of your preferred tools to start exploration!

How TP works?

(Source: YouTube )

Friendly reminder: Press FULL SCREEN before watching the clip 😉

Until Mid-January 2013, TP provides an amazing variety of 12 FREE and 3 paid-up visually engaging resources for English teachers to run simultaneously inside and outside classrooms (Figure 1). Generally, it incorporates a series of 5 colour-coded Quizzes, Selectors, Timers, Tools and Legacy Resources (Figure 2), encouraging teachers to bring innovation and motivation to a unique ESL/EFL classroom. 

(Figure 1 - Several resources run simultaneously)

(Figure 2 - Five colour-coded resource categories)

Interesting Pedagogical Facts or Positive Comments of TP

1.     According to The Triptico Blog and current Twitter comments, these resources are proved to be adapted to diverse learning needs, abilities, topic interests and teaching contexts at different years of age.

2.     Indeed, most teachers are often in a predicament of striking a balance between breathless pace of teaching schedule and preparation for school-based materials. Personally, TP is a generous gift to ALL teachers as we do not need extra professional training, but simply familiarize ourselves with the available resources. 


3.    The Triptico Cloud is a platform for us to save, edit and share school-based resources among colleagues, generating a stronger sense of belonging and bonding in the English team. It should be noted that you will receive updates once new resources are developed and new blog posts are added.

4.   You don’t need to panic if you experience difficulties while creating interactive learning resources. You can always (i) click Open Resource and view a demo (Figure 3); (ii) visit The Academy Home and read the step-by-step instructions (Figure 4) and/or (iii) watch demonstrations on YouTube. Moreover, it is noteworthy that the TP pioneer, David Riley, is receptive to any feedback and requests from you! And YES! He does respond actively and constructively in both blogs and Twitter.

(Figure 3 - View a demo)

(Figure 4 - Step-by-step instructions at Academy Home)

Hong Kong Context

Situation 1

(Source: Google)

In a typical primary ESL/EFL classroom, teachers often commence the lesson by asking students to recite vocabulary or tense table in a particular textbook chapter. From my past teaching experience, it seems that students easily feel monotonous and demotivating. 😞

Resolution

👍  Tools: Word Magnets (WM)

It comprises various templates for sorting, grouping, labelling or matching unlimited verb tenses (e.g., present, past, past participles…etc.) (Figure 5) This implies that WM is able to provide ALL students equal learning opportunities to practice target language. While students are waiting for their turns to categorize the verbs on the IWB, they can engage in collaborative learning – interact and negotiate meaning in pairs or groups and check if their peers’ answers are correct or not.

(Figure 5 - Tense table with WM)

👍   Quizzes: Word Mix

Depending on the lesson aims and objectives, teachers can create interactive vocabulary quizzes with Word Mix and play on the IWB or personal computers. For example, if you want to check students’ spelling and understanding of the vocabulary meaning, you can type the correct answer along with either text clues or image clues. Similarly, audio clues can be inserted if you want to enhance their spelling and pronunciation of the newly learnt vocabulary.

Situation 2

In the spirit of Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory of mind, English learning is mediated and influenced by social interaction. Therefore, collaborative learning along with time management are often of teachers’ primary concern in a 35-minute lesson.

Resolution

As mentioned earlier, available resources can be adopted simultaneously.

👍  Task Spinner is an appealing tool to invite more students as individuals to articulate their thoughts in English confidently and excitingly. 

👍    Student Group can help teachers assign students into mixed ability group randomly. 

👍   Task Timer is highly recommended within the Timer category. Perceivably, it is very likely that students are motivated to engage in different tasks at an ideal stress level when time and the following tasks are displayed on the screen according to teacher’s set-up.

General Limitations

1. Since Triptico Plus runs on Adobe Air, its program is unfortunately not functioned with other technological devices such as an iPad and iPhone. Yet, it works on interactive whiteboard, personal computers and MacBook.

2. In Hong Kong, the average class size is as large as 30-35 students. Unless the school purchases at least 35 personal computers plus a permanent online connection service, or else it may not be feasible or inefficient to give every student the same learning opportunity to practice English skills with the tailor-made resources in class.

3. Despite Triptico Plus incorporating a vast variety of learning resources, some of them such as Quizzes Word Mix cannot cater the three major learning styles (i.e., visual, audio and kinesthetic) simultaneously. In practice, teachers can only insert either audio, image or text clues for the vocabulary consolidation. Also, it is unfortunate that the list of vocabulary can only use one type of clue throughout the whole activity.

4. Teachers may need to install Adobe Flash Player plus buy a microphone if the computer does not support audio recording function.

Wrap-up Thoughts

After exploring Triptico Plus, I think it is WORTHWHILE to spend more time exploring and creating our own game-like materials by trial and error. With CONSTANT PRACTICES on the 5 distinct available resources, as well as ENGAGE YOURSELF in COLLABORATIVE + INTERACTIVE DIALOGUES with other educationalists, not only have YOU realized TP is a powerful tool empowering your 5Cs (i.e., Creativity, Confidence, Consciousness and iCt Competence) in English language teaching, but also become frontline change agents in motivating learners in a digital generation era! 👏

HEY! I hope YOU have gained some inspiration after BLOGGING my first post!

💭  What are your instant thoughts and feelings towards TP? 

Please feel free to 💬 / ✍  / 📧  below!

More updates will be available next week! Have an insightful Friday! 😄


Reference
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher thought processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.