Online Student Response Systems

A few weeks ago we talked about using Google Forms for formative assessments or surveys.

Here are two more online tools that teachers can use to collect information on the fly. These tools work well on both tablets and laptops and all responses are anonymous. If you want to track individual responses, your best bet is to design your own Google Form.

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Socrative

"Take a snapshot of student thinking through real time formative assessment. It's super easy to gather responses and get whole class participation. Just choose your question type, ask a question, and wait for responses."

Socrative is an online student response system that allows teachers to construct their own online quizzes and see student responses immediately. If you don't have the time to design the quiz ahead of time, you can ask the questions orally in class and have students respond online. You can then discuss their results immediately. Multiple choice, true/false and short answer questions are all possible.

What do you need to do? Sign up for an account at socrative.com. When setting up your account, you will choose a room number. This room number is all the students need to connect to you to complete your quizzes or provide feedback. See the video below for an example of how it works.

Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is primarily designed to allow students to text their responses to a poll or quiz and have their responses displayed immediately. Responding via a website is possible too, so this tool will work quite nicely in our one-to-one environment.

With Poll Everywhere, you can create your quiz with multiple choice or open-ended questions and receive feedback immediately as students complete the quiz.

What do you need to do? Sign up for an account at polleverywhere.com. Since we will want our students to respond by using a web interface instead of texting, you will want to reserve your own polling response page at http://www.polleverywhere.com/my/pollev. Once you set that up, your students can go to a fixed site (like http://www.pollev.com/msbarclay) to enter responses to any poll you run. At any time you can launch a poll and then clear your response results and start again. See the video below to see how it works.

As always, if you would like to try out either of these tools, just let Sarah or Lara know!