Socrative - a Popular Quiz Tool

Socrative is a really great help if you are the teacher who would like to know your students' learning results by testing them in the form of quizzes. It enables you to check immediately how your students are doing with what has been taught. Also, from students' perspective, they may be eager to know whether their answers are right or not!  I like the overall design of this site - simple, clear and very user-friendly. It is completely free and available on computers and mobile devices, so students can access the quiz in their smartphones or iPads (which makes tests really handy and environmentally friendly!).

In ELT, this tool is particularly useful for vocabulary, listening and reading lessons, as the exercises or tests for these parts are usually in the form of quizzes. Socrative provides different types of quizzes : Student Paced-Immediate Feedback, Student Paced-Student Navigation and Teacher Paced. In student-paced quizzes, you can provide explanation to the answer, which can be seen after students submit their own answers. This can greatly increase the efficiency in the class, reducing the teacher’s talk. Another thing worth noting is that, in the student-navigated quiz, students can do the test in their own order. In other words, they can skip the questions that they have no idea about at that moment and finish them later, or they can edit their answers if they change their minds or get any new ideas afterwards. In Nicole Naditz’s article, she points out that the ability to re-evaluate one’s belief is an important skill that teachers should help students to cultivate during the teaching process. In addition, if you want to have your students discuss with other classmates after finishing one question and before going to the next one, you can design the quiz using the teacher-paced format, which allows you to control the flow of questions. After the whole class finishing the quiz, you can choose different ways to view your report (see the following picture). 

Apart from quizzes, you can start a Quick Question or Space Race. Quick Question can help you collect your students' opinions of a specific topic (you can provide several choices for them and ask them to choose or you can make it a short answer question). For language teachers, it can be used in a writing class to collect students' ideas about a writing topic. Space Race adds some gamification into the tests which helps to enhance students’ engagement. While students are competing in a race in different teams, there are “rockets” in different colours informing which team progresses faster. In this way, they may have more motivation to finish the quiz.

Other advantages of this tool include that it makes teaching and learning more flexible. Once you open a quiz, you can leave it and have your students finish it anytime and anywhere (in or after class). This tool is even more useful when teaching a large class where gathering all the students' quiz papers and correcting them can take a lot of time. Furthermore, instead of using this tool to create quizzes, you can turn the quiz into a survey, collecting your students' feedback of your lesson or anything you want to know from them. It just makes things easier!

However, you can only run one quiz at a time, which may be inconvenient if you teach more than one class or if you want to carry out different tasks at the same time. Another potential problem is that some students may not have a device to access the quiz or the school does not have a proper broadband for all the students in the class to use. But this may be solved by dividing students into groups and each group is guaranteed to have at least one usable device. 

Finally, if you want a detailed tutorial of this tool, have a look at the following video: