Tuesday, May 29, 2012

A colleague of mine, introduced me to Socrative. "Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets ." (taken from socrative.com) I downloaded the app to my Iphone and began playing.

 I began thinking of the possible applications for this technology in my Grade 6 classroom and became quite excited with some of the ideas that began pouring in my head.  The buzz words of assessment for learning, and assessment of learning began circling my thoughts. I forgot for a moment about the restrictions in using this technology, the fact that our students can not connect to the wireless network to use their own personal devices to make this technology what it is supposed to be. I did however, think about how to make this work given what I have.

I needed to check this out. I signed up, received my room number and off I went. My lesson plan for the afternoon included a math review of patterning concepts. I had intended on photocopying an assessment that included multiple choice items as well as short answer questions. I transformed this thought into the possibility of using Socrative to create an online version of the assessment. Using copy and paste, I was quickly and efficiently able to transform this boring math assessment into this "new" technology. However, in doing so, I was not able to figure how to copy images into the questions, so I still had to do SOME photocopying to have students see the figures that was included in the questions. I booked the computer room where all students would have access to Socrative (via computer). I was ready to go, I was so excited.

Afternoon classes came and finally it was time to put Socrative to the test. The kids were excited and stoked about using this new technology. They were curious and some were a little worried about doing something new. I told then how to log on and briefed them on how it worked. That was it.I didn't have to do anymore than that. They entered their information and began the assessment. As they did, I was able to track their progress on my Iphone, as I logged into the Teacher Socrative app,  where I was able to monitor their  correct responses and where they were with the assessment. As I sat back observing , a few observations emerged:

1) students overall caught on very quickly to the technology, where there were no students having difficulty using the program
2) some students took longer to complete the given tasks than they would have if using pencil/paper, while others completed the assessment more quickly
3) one of the questions had students representing an equation where traditionally they would draw a picture to represent it. They now had to figure out a way to represent this equation using only the keyboard (using letters and symbols). The students that I consider the top in math in the class struggled with this question. They shut down saying there was no way they could represent the equation if they could not draw pictures. However, the student who has been struggling the most in the class this year, was the FIRST student to come up with a way to represent the equation. (I thought this was the most interesting thing from the day!)
4) After reflecting on the activity, students said they really liked using the technology; it made the assessment more interesting. However, they said that they felt they could not really show their true learning because they were not familiar with the program and they became frustrated with trying to figure out how to represent their equations. They said that it was at that point they wanted to go back to using pencil and paper.

These observations really hones in well with my post from yesterday talking about provincial assessments becoming available online and how I felt it would be important to ensure students are using the technology all year. This little experiment I completed in class yesterday supports this opinion.

Here is a link to Socrative :
Socrative

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