Necessity is the mother of invention. After years of wanting, lack of time finally enabled me to use Socrative, an assessment app, www.socrative.com

My best learning occurs when I’m out of my comfort zone and complaining shows the limits of my comfort zone. I now relish complaints because they mean learning will happen. My complaint was lack of time and constant rushing.

Three classes of Year 1 Bachelor of Education students were learning about language teaching approaches. I had covered four approaches. Groups of student were then responsible for teaching a language teaching approach using any digital technology. We covered 28 teaching approaches. As agreed, students’ uploaded learning resources to our Facebook group—where each view is recorded. Disappointingly, most student posted their resource but did not view others. So I announced … a quiz. Finally an opportunity to introduce Socrative.

However, realistically I had no time to write a quiz, other tasks just had to be prioritized. But then I realised student-teachers needed to learn to create and critically evaluate test questions. So each group wrote three test questions, about their approach, for a digital test environment, i.e., true/false, single answer and multiple answer choice questions. Students created clear questions and and correct ‘keys’ and incorrect believable ‘distractors’. Groups were supported to select and improve one of their questions. In retrospect, students should have sent questions digitally, instead I typed the best questions from each group’s paper notes into Socrative.

I would have liked to explore Socrative before use in class, but no time. So the students and I explored Socrative together. First we did the ‘Teacher Paced’ quiz, answering questions, reviewing class responses on the smartboard and discussing each teaching approach. Simply because we were curious, in teams students re-did the same test using the Socrative Space Race. Re-doing the same test was judged by students as valuable (and fun) repetition. Finally we used Socrative Exit Tickets. Students all used the symbol . as their name to remain anonymous. Socrative asked 1) How well did you understand today’s material? 2) What did you learn in today’s class? and 3) Please answer the teacher’s question. This immediate anonymous feedback will help me take my learning and teaching to the next level. I have wanted to use exit tickets ever since I read Brookfield (1995). From now on I’ll be using Socrative Exit Tickets after every class. A valuable learnful app. Highly recommended.