Socrative Secrets

Socrative has become a very popular, as well as useful, formative assessment tool in the world of education. Mastery Connect continues to offer this tool as a free option to help drive instruction through instant analytics.

Socrative Basic Use

Socrative has some basic features that allow you to assess your students and get instant results. Socrative is device agnostic and available on browsers as well as apps.

Accessibility
Students can access the teachers questions and activities without signing up. Students simply input the teacher room name when prompted and wait for a question.

Quick Questions
Instantly assess your students with multiple choice, true false, or short answer questions. These don't need to be planned, they can be spontaneous and help drive instruction. Note- only short answer allows you to actually type in a question.

Quizzes
Deliver pre-made quizzes to your class and receive GRADED results. Sign in with your GAFE account and Socrative will even create a folder for the reports where you can store them and access them later. Tired of individual work? Gamify your quizzes using the Space Race feature. Have students race rocket ships or unicorns in randomly assigned teams.

Socrative Secrets

Frequently teachers ask me about next steps with Socrative. Like any app there are multiple ways to apply the same tool based on what you want the result to be. Here are some of my favorite tricks. 

Student Voting

Using the Vote Now feature on the response sheet of the Short Answer option is by far my favorite feature. With this feature you can allow students to drive critical thinking in the classroom. No longer are teachers providing the "right answer", they allow students to analyze other responses and vote on which is the best. This is a powerful tool that can drive instruction and affect student performance instantly. Specific examples we've seen success with are thesis statements for research papers, responses to DBQ's, point of view responses in history, and open answers in math. 

Technology Station

Stations are not just for primary classrooms. Secondary instruction can benefit from station rotations such as the Tabor model where blended learning drives student creation and assessment. Socrative provides a great platform to send assessments and allow for open ended questions. 

When using a class set of tablets/computers complete the activity and start a new one at each rotation. Even if you've locked in the app (guided access on the iPad) the new activity will allow the user to submit their name and answer without having to leave the room. 

Shared Quizes

Import thousands of shared quizzes, and add your own favorites, at the site garden.socrative.com. Follow instructions to search for your subject or specific keyword. 

Socrative as a Delivery System

Socrative can be used as a basic delivery system using the Short Answer feature. Simply type out what todays activities are and even have them submit a short answer or journal entry to a prompt. 

*Embedding Items*

Google Map with Question- Student View

Have an embed code for your activity? Paste the embed code in the Quick Question bar and it will send the item to your students within the Socrative platform. Here's a couple we have found success with:

• Send a Zaption activity for your students to complete.
• Embed the current weather conditions from the AccuWeather Widget. 
• Include an open ended question after a YouTube embed code. Students can view in the Socrative platform and submit their response. 
• Use the embed code on your Google Map to send out with a question. Can you manipulate the map? Of course. :) Switch from street view to satellite? Yup. 
• Embed ThingLink interactive pictures so students can access information and videos from pictures. 
• Use embed.ly to put in any web page. Students are stuck on the specific page you send, but sometimes that's nice. 

Playing with the embed options has become a new hobby this summer. Please post suggestions in the comments below!

SXSWedu: Cleaning Up the Brain Matter

As a classroom teacher I was seldom allowed out to continue my education and network with other educators. Despite my opinions on this I am not only pleased but often overwhelmed with the opportunities I receive for continuing education in my new position.

SXSWedu offered a unique opportunity to listen, talk, and experience. I’ve never been to an education conference with such a diverse group of attendees, bringing with them their enthusiasm and unique lens. I was truly mind blown throughout many of my experiences. For my own good I’ll process a few of those here, and hopefully light a spark in your own head along the way. 

Maker Movement

This is a new interest of mine, but the more I research I realize it isn’t. Growing up I have fond memories of testing the pitch of our neighborhood bike ramps to find the perfect launch into the lake. During one of the Winter Olympic watch-a-thons at my house I used every piece of paper I could find to construct my own vision of an Olympic park. Even today I would rather consult my garage scrap pile for functional furniture projects than head over to a big box store. 

I’ve come to find that this is what the Maker Movement is- simply a title on what many of us have already been doing. I was so taken by a speech by Rosanne Somerson on critical making and design I bought her book on the way out Thursday (first book bought in years, but the way). I look forward to reading it, but more importantly to evolving my own ideas of making to influence the way we teach. I can already see  students experimenting with modifications for a canal system out of cardboard, measuring angles and designing structures to support weight, and constructing circuits to provide power to their own lighting systems. 

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality caught my eye several years ago when an app called Around Me used it to show the location of restaurants and other places of interest. You’d hold up your phone and see the city before you with imposed signs of restaurant names. Since then it has come a long way, and apps like Aurasma and Blippar are bringing it to the education world. While the applications are time consuming I can see a day where wearable technology like glasses change the way students view and interact with their environment.

I have to assume this will evolve where the money is: gaming. I can see it now, millions of basement dwelling gamers emerge with their AR enabled glasses to battle GPS placed monsters, gain riches through hidden chests, and view their co-players with armor and regalia that us non-gamers will never know about. But from there, how hard will it be to impose Santa Anna and his troops in the plaza in front of the Alamo? Can we hold up a phone and be only a few feet from Dr. King in front of the Lincoln Memorial? I’m no math expert, but if I were able to view an object with angles and equations labeled it might make more sense to me. This is the one to watch in the next few years. 

Wearable Technology

How apropos that I heard about this in several sessions with the release of the Apple Watch in the near future. But what is out there that our students (and school districts) can actually afford? And how can we use these to innovate the learning environment? 

We collect data every day on our students. From attendance to assessment, they are tracked and analyzed their whole life. With wearable technology we can expand this to track things like pulse rate, movement, and even brainwaves. We don’t even know what we can do with all of this yet, but the possibilities of building the most engaging lessons in the history of planning periods is there. 

From a coach perspective we need to implement the use of this technology now. Students have location enabled phones in their position. Why not incorporate the data they are collecting on themselves in to weekend workouts, daily challenges, or even personal growth plans? Devices like Fitbit and Pebble offer a more comfortable version, but their smart phone works just as well. 

Community Involvement

In my district we have a firm grasp on the ability to Tweet and post just about everything that happens. But who is this reaching? How are our community members engaging in communication? Have we asked, or do we just assume they will jump on the ship we have built? 

I went to an amazing, thought-provoking session with Joe Mazza on the concept of FACE (Family and Community Engagement) and eFACE (think we’ll call it iFACE). While his session challenged many of the things I thought we were doing right it was the collaboration in the room that brought out questions and solutions that left us all carrying the conversation out of the room. Though there were many ideas present, the concept on ‘unconferencing’ parent meetings in an edcamp style was the most exciting. I look forward to bringing back some of these ideas to my team and district. 

Differentiating Education

Differentiation is not a new concept, but the way Sal Kahn explained his vision and mission for education really left me energized. It was fitting this was the last speech of the conference, and it rebooted my motivation for assisting teachers in evolving education with innovative technology. The concepts he spoke about made so much sense:

A student scoring a 90 on a test still doesn’t know 10% of the material. 

Traditional education models allow for gaps in education. Get what you can, then move on. 

Is abandoning pacing guides really a fear of teachers?? I tend to think the opposite. Today with innovative technology we can blend the learning environment and flip most of the traditional teaching to provide an individual pathway for our students to not just reach 70%, or even 90%, but 100% of the skills we want to teach them. Why should we accept anything less?

I texted something to myself on Tuesday during a session: Problems are simply opportunities for innovation. I will continue to look at the world this way, and can truly thank the presenters and attendees for influencing this way of thought. 

AVIDigital: AVID Digital Strategies

Overview

Over the course of the year I have been working closely with our high school AVID teacher, Joel Velasco, to digitize the process of organization and note taking. Our campus offers a 1:1 situation but relies on the student to pay an insurance fee before receiving their device. We wanted to build a system that would be device agnostic and cater to the smart phone generation. Through some trial and error we have found a solution that seems to be working for the students that are brave enough to practice it.

Classmint Cornell Notes

Last year our AVID instructor found a web 2.0 company named Classmint to use as his Cornell Notes system on student devices. The platform even allows students to 'fold' their notes just like the real thing. This separates it from simply building a template in a Doc and replicating it for every class. Students have cloud storage through the system and can 'publish' the notes to share the URL. Other features allow you to tag notes and organize them into folders under the My Notes tab. 

The service does allow you to export a PDF copy in order to load in cloud services or print out. Unfortunately this feature seems to fail when I try it, and this would cause some issues for students that are dealing with teachers that have a lower comfort with tech integration and need paper copies. 

Digital Binder

We quickly realized that we needed to digitize one of the key features of AVID, the binder. The traditional three inch binder complete with pencil pouch, loose leaf paper, and dividers is the antithesis of the common 15 year old. We knew that once we created a system for the binder the other facets of AVID would follow. Form templates could be made to account for tutorials. Writing activities would come alive with modern processing tools. Even collaboration takes a new face with video conferences and collaborative apps like Google Docs and BaiBoard. 

First Trial: Google Sheets Notebook

Shot of my sample Sheets Notebook.

Our first trial used a technique I saw in use at an elementary in our district. Using a website or some other tool they were able to build a digital table of contents for their class procedures, lesson overviews, etc. The system used a basic hyperlink formula that is pretty common in sheets: HYPERLINK=("URL","hyperlink display name"). With this you can link to videos, Google Docs, and their Classmint notes.
From our end this was an easy process, but I'm not a 15 year old. Most found the process very cumbersome and archaic. "Type in a formula? How 2010." This was not the solution we were working for.

Second Trial: Evernote

My last three years in the classroom I used Evernote as a digital storage bank of board notes, files, and hyperlinks. This was the easiest way I found to record what I was doing and share it with my students and parents. The process was so fluid that I would even have students turn in work coming in from an absence because they checked the site and stayed current. It was a very powerful communication for me as a teacher and I still encourage others to use it in this fashion. I often had parents emailing me mid-day asking for an Evernote update. Now that's powerful. 

View of my Evernote Dashboard from teaching. 

One night I was looking through some of my old Texas History posts and I decided to switch to my 2012-13 notebook to look back at some of my World Culture assignments. That's when it hit. Online notebooks. Sharing options. File loading. Image and photo capabilities. This was what we've been searching for, and it's one of the most advertised and successful apps out there. 

The Evernote platform was easy for the students to catch on to. With the addition of the Scannable app, students were now able to scan their worksheets from their less tech focused classes and include them in their online notebook. My co-worker even found a Cornell Notes template that students could replicate and fill in. 

Be warned: there are some storage limitations. Evernote runs it on a month to month basis. If students really got carried away they could easily hit the mark, but we haven't encountered this yet. 

To Be Continued...

As our pilot continues I'll update this blog in comments. At this point we are happy with the Evernote solution but continue to search for the next big thing. If you are interested in learning more or collaborating on our AVIDigital adventures email me at tejashanson@gmail.com.