Another Great Tool: Socrative

Want your students to use a smart phone for good, not evil? What kind of things could you do with instant feedback from your students? Socrative is an interesting web site which hosts questions that students can answer using any device that has web access, such as a smart phone.

The Idea

Create a couple of comprehension check questions that you would like to ask while giving a lecture, or a quick quiz to check up on your students.  Use the feedback to help steer the class or even to aid error correction.

What to do

Create a Socrative account.  Your account now controls a "classroom".  Now, create a quiz or even just one or two questions you would like to ask your students during a lecture.

Give the students the code to enter the classroom.   They can use their phone or any device that has Internet access by going to m.socrative.com and answering the questions that you ask.

You can then use the feedback to help you gauge how much time to spend on the topic, which students need more work, what kind of mistakes people are making, etc.

Example

Go to http://www.socrative.com/ and create a teacher account.  Follow the directions on how to use the site.  Make some questions or quizzes.  If you would like to try one of the quizzes I made, use the codes below. I'll try to add more quizzes.

If you would like to see what it is like for students, join this class: 261381.  Take the quiz.

What is really nice is that you get an email report of the answers at the end in the form of a spreadsheet.  I really like printing this out for students the next day and having them correct their own and other's mistakes.

What is really neat about this report is if you have a projector, or better yet smart board (I have an Eno board), you can project the wrong answers on the screen (without the names) and correct mistakes right then and there.

Here is an example worksheet I made with real responses from the students.

Try it!

What would you like to see done with this technology?  What are some good quiz ideas you have?  What are some other ways we can get our ESL students to use their smart phone smart?

Pod Cast

Following the trend of the last few posts about flipping the classroom, here is a Pod Cast type recording of a lecture on process writing.

The Idea

Have students listen about the steps in writing an essay.  Have them make a study guide after to aid them in the process.  The idea is to have students teach themselves on the subject, you checking up on them to make sure they follow through.

How

Record yourself speaking on any device.  Upload to podbean.com.  Share with your students.  Come up with a way to check comprehension.

Example

Here is a website I made that would allow students to walk through the whole process online.

Here is the actual podcast.

What About You?

Have you ever thought about making a podcast?  What kind of things do you think would be useful for ESL students to listen to?