Engage Your Class With Socrative

High School students at NHS complete a quiz using iPads and Socrative.

At the EdTech conference several months ago, I attended a session which demonstrated how Socrative can be used for assessing student achievement.  We used a variety of mobile devices, and being the geek that I am, I tried it out on both my iPad and my Android smart phone.  I was very impressed with the service, particularly how quick and easy it was to set up compared to Turning Point.  I liked the fact that it is something that is immediately usable in a computer lab setting, without even the need for purchasing licenses.  The interface appeared distraction-free, and intuitive for both teachers and students.  This felt like the future.

Socrative is an online testing platform similar to Turning Point, with a few key differences.  Unlike Turning Point, there are no clickers.  Students use an internet-connected device to answer multiple-choice, short answer, fill-in-the-blank or essay questions.  Any device can be used with Socrative, from desktop computers to laptops to tablets and even smart phones or iPods.  In fact, with its simple interface, Socrative really shines on mobile devices.

Here's a brief outline explaining how it works:
1. The teacher creates an account with Socrative.  This account generates a "room number" that students will use when they go to the Socrative website.  Students do not need their own account.
2. Assignments are created by the teacher.  As mentioned above, the flexibility of the platform allows for multiple types of questions.
3. Students navigate to the Socrative website, and use the number provided by the teacher to join in.  The teacher can set individual assignments so that they are teacher-paced or student-paced.
4. At the conclusion of the assignment, the teacher receives an Excel spreadsheet in their email inbox, with the responses, and, if applicable, a grade report.

The Socrative service is free (for now), and extremely easy to set up and manage.  It is entirely web-based.  For more details, check it out here.

Edmodo – Classroom Management under the guise of Social Networking

Here is a site where you can create polls, quizzes and assignments. You can create a library of handouts accessible by the students, and students can turn in assignments. You can do all this in an environment that simulates that in which students spend much of their non-school time.

Edmodo has a “Facebook” look to it. It uses the Facebook colors, and layout. In addition it incorporates profile pictures, etc. However, I view it as primarily a class management tool. I’m also aware that the minute (second) you hear “facebook” red flags may go up. Let me assure you that the teacher is in control, and the real purpose is to facilitate classroom management and (if so desired) social interaction with an educational purpose.

When the teacher initially creates their account they begin by setting up a “group” or “groups”—I’m tempted to call them classes, but, you might use this capacity to set up reading groups, groups assigned to report on different subjects, etc. After this, students can log on and join the group by using the “group code” (no need to fear some child predator stalking the group.) Once all the students are enrolled, the teacher can lock the code so no one else can attempt to join. (Although you can arrange to have new students join at any time.) Additional settings available to the teacher include the ability to make all new members “read only” or to moderate all discussion. These policies can be set either by individual student or by the group—or some combination thereof. To put this into plain English, the teacher has about three layers of control here—at their option NO discussion can be posted, only approved discussion can be posted, or discussion can be posted without being previewed by the teacher—and these controls can be applied to the class as a whole, or to individual students. However, at no point can the students “message” individual students—they CAN send a private message to the class as a whole (if the teacher has enabled that option –in which case the teacher may still opt to approve or edit each individual comment or reply before they are posted). Students can also send a private comment to the teacher.

So, that sort of describes the Social Networking part of it….nothing for a teacher to panic over, students will not get involved in distracting private chats, bullying, etc…it just can’t happen.
But why SHOULD you use Edmodo? Well, here are some of the things you can do…
1.) Add Resources—you can add print documents, links, images, and videos available to students. --students can also add resources—they can attach them to wall postings, or add them to their “backpack.”
2.) Make and collect assignments—teachers can make assignments either as a wall post or on a pdf document which the student can open and read. Students can then turn in assignments by uploading a file, by selecting a file previously added to their backpack.
3.) Create and assign quizzes. Teachers can create quizzes at the Edmodo site. When the student goes to the site the “take quiz” post pops up and the student can then take a quiz on line—at the teacher’s option they may or may not see the result of that quiz upon completion.
4.) Grade the assignments, send comments on them privately to students, and have the grades attomatically recorded and averaged in an online gradebook—where grades can be weighted by point value, or all weighted the same.
5.) Create polls. Students can log on and see a question. After the student answers the a bar graph appears showing the results of the poll in real time.
6.) Parents can log on and see their students grades, see which assignments are missing, view the comments you have written about the various graded assignments, new assignments, upcoming events,. In addition they can exchange messages with the teacher. However they can not see the “wall” where the classroom interaction takes place.
7.) Above I mentioned “upcoming events”—a calendar is built into Edmodo and only the teacher can post events/due dates on the calendar.
8.) Above I mentioned “awards.” Edmodo makes it easy for the teacher to assign “award badges.”

To see an assortment of videos on Edmodo in action, go to their channel on SchoolTube.

To check out Edmodo for yourself, go to http://www.edmodo.com/

If you go to the Arcadia High School website, you’ll see a link to an online poll. From the polls results so far it looks like parents feel one area we are not doing an adequate job of is preparing our students for online classroom environments. Using Edmodo would help to address that deficiency.

To learn all of this, I’ve been experimenting with Edmodo. In so doing I’ve created a class called “make believe students.’ If you’d like to join the class and see how it looks, go to edmodo.com, click on “I’m a student” and use the group code “pcyo8f”

If I don't post anything more before the end of the year, have a nice summer.

Today's Meet

On the afternoon of March 14th I attended an EdTech session entitled “High Tech History”  conducted by Aaron Dodge a middle school social studies teacher, and Jennifer Richardson an ITRT, both of Charles City. As it turns out, the websites are ones which Aaron has used in his history class, but, aren't at all specific to history.

I don’t have a lot of notes from the session, but, here are some brief remarks on some of the websites they mentioned.

First on the list is Today’s Meet, which was discribed as similar to Twitter. Today’s meet is an elegantly simple site…with some drawbacks. It is premised on the supposition that there is backchannel discussion” going on in your classroom. A backchannel discussion is “everything going on in the room that isn’t coming from the presenter”—things like; “What are your doing after school tonight?” Here is a quote from their website:

“The backchannel is where people ask each other questions, pass notes, get distracted, and give you the most immediate feedback you'll ever get.
Instead of ignoring the backchannel, TodaysMeet helps you leverage its power.
Tapping into the backchannel lets you tailor and direct your presentation to the audience in front of you, and unifying the backchannel means the audience can share insights, questions and answers like never before.”

You simply go to the site, create a “room” and decide how long you want it to be active—from a couple of hours to a year. Once the room is created, you have a short URL which anyone can go to and contribute to the discussion. If someone wants to contribute to the discussion, they type in their name and a message (of 140 characters or less), and click on “say” The message then appears on the screen of anyone else who is at that website. The obvious drawback is that the teacher cannot moderate the discussion. In fact, the creator of the class room is at the same level as everyone else, they can contribute messages, but so can anyone. Any student could make up a bogus name and enter a distracting, disruptive, or obscene remark.

The teacher can switch to a “projector” mode showing only the discussion …or on “transcript” and get a printable copy of the discussion.

The next website they mentioned was Edmodo.com. After writing the draft for the text above, I spent a couple of hours investigating Edmodo. I’m really excited about Edmodo and want to give it its own posting, so I’ll save that for just a bit.

The ITRTs of ACPS were already well aware of a couple of additional
sites mentioned in the session:

GoAnimate—for making animated videos. We’ll have to do some future blogs on all the sites similar to this one.

Blabberize--for producing talking, embeddable avatars from photos. That is, taking a photo of someone’s face, uploading it, and making the mouth move up and down as a voice (yours or a digitally produced one) speaks from a script you’ve written.

Vocaroo--"The premier voice recording service"  At this site, in theory, you can click and record a message (our firewall seems to prevent this from working at school) or upload a message you recorded on your laptop recorder (this worked).  A link is then generated which displays a media player that will play back the recording.  Embed code is also produced allowing  you to post the player in a webpage.  There are also sharing options tailored to twitter, facebook, wordpress, etc.

That’s it for this entry, but, I promise, it won’t be long before I create another post dealing with Edmodo.