Socrative: Free, easy, and fun

How I Use It

First, I would like to point out that Socrative came with no cost. I am still using it free of charge. So far, this application suits my needs; I do not intent to purchase the Socrative subscription.

Socrative is an assessment and reporting tool; there are no other applications apart from those intended functions two functions. A teacher could also use it as a low budget survey tool; however, the free version of Socrative would not provide the teacher with the analytics of the survey, and a tool such as Survey Monkey could provide you with both the assessment tool and a survey tool, but at an annual cost of approximately $90. So if your budget limit is $0, and all you really want is an assessment tool, then Socrative is right for you. In a digital environment, it greatly reduces the logistic footprint of traditional written assessments. No need for printer ink, paper, pencils, or pens, so it saves on resources and the time it takes to distribute and retrieve those resources. Grading is automatic; this greatly decreases the time it takes to evaluate an assessment.

For my purposes, I used my assessment plan to create a formative assessment in Socrative for the students. These ten questions addressed the learning objectives for that course. There were three true/false, five multiple-choice, and two short answer. Creating a quiz is very simple. There are only five ribbons on the top bar, “quizzes” being the second. After navigating to the quizzes section, creating questions are very intuitive. Select true/false, multiple-choice, or short answer, create a question, and then supply possible correct and incorrect answers. When using the multiple-choice questions, you can create more than one correct answer. For short answers, you need to include every possible answer. One of my short answers was “one month.” I also included “1 month” as an option. One of the students wrote in “30 days,” which I did not account for because I assumed the learner would answer using months as a time metric. I modified the answer to include “30 days,” “31 days,” “28 days” for February, and “29 days” to account for leap year.

We conducted the period of instruction and assessment off location, so before the lesson, I asked the students download the Socrative Student application on their phones. They did not bring their laptops to the venue, but they all had smartphones. As the students took the test, I was able to monitor the results real-time on my laptop. Additionally, you have the option to provide the learner with immediate feedback, so if they selected the wrong answer, the test would provide with the right answer to the students and an explanation why the answer is correct.