Using Socrative to help students practice writing.

The Common CORE of academic standards is coming down the pike. Students need to practice their writing skills in all classes in order to meet these new literacy standards. One way to do this is by using Socrative. A teacher can put one short answer question in a quiz and have students take the quiz. The question needs to be one that takes at least a couple of sentences to answer. 

We are trying something in our science department. A couple of times a week we'll ask the students a question that takes some writing skill to answer. The question can have something to do with what we have studied that day or it may have something to do with an article or a textbook passage the students may have read. We'll have the students answer the question in Socrative. After the students finish, it is easy to get the results from Socrative and have an electronic record (or print record) of what the students have done.

Here is how it can be done:

1. Log in to Socrative with your e-mail address and password

2. You will need to scroll down and click "Manage Quizzes"

3. I have a quiz already entered ("Bike Pressure Quiz").

4. If you click "Edit Quiz" you can change, add, or delete questions.

6. After saving the quiz, you would click "Start Quiz"

7. Choose the quiz you want the students to take.

8.  Click the "Student Paced Quiz" option and make sure the students enter the correct room number (mine is 8371)

9. Your screen will look like this while the students are taking the quiz. There isn't a real need to click the "Live Results" tab since the students are taking a short answer quiz and not a multiple choice.

10. When the students are finished (or when time is up), click "End Activity"

11. You will be given options for your report. If you want to give the students more time, click "Cancel."

12. Your report will be in an Excel spreadsheet. The original report is shown below. You will need to do some tweaking to make it look the way you want.

13. You will need to increase the row height in order to see the entire answer for each student. You may also need to adjust the column width.

14. Here is what a final report for that question may look like:

You can then either save the files in a folder as the students do these, or you can print them out. Happy writing!

Credit to Gregg Lunt for coming up with the idea.