What did I do?
This is a description of a playful interactive experiment with Socrative that I carried out in Do One phase. The first aim of this experiment was to urge my students to read chosen chapters in the course literature before they attend the lecture and the second aim was to familiarize the students with interactive tools which they probably will use in their teacher practice with their pupils. The experiment was carried out in the classroom interactively in an online multimedia learning environment (Socrative) where learners answered multiple-choice questions. Apart from this the task required interpersonal activities. The task meets the requirements for an interactive instructional task (see Damnik et.al 2017).
How did you do it?
My students were supposed to read a chapter in Second Language Acquisition Myths (Brown & Larson -Hall 2012). The lecture before only few students had read the earlier chapter and they reflected that they had difficulties to understand the complex text. My goal was therefore to support them in the reading and point out the central concepts in the bookchapters with multiple-choice questions, true/false questions and short answers. This is how I did:
- I logged in to Socrative as Teacher and created a Room where I collected all my tasks.
- I chose to make a quiz with both multiple-choice answers and true/false answers.
- When the test was ready I launched it and the students could log in to my room.
- I chose to have my quiz teacher-paced which made it possible to instruct the students. This interactive task represented learner-self and learner-instructor type (see Wei et al., 2015).
How did it go?
My evaluation and reflection on the playful experiment is devided int before and after experience of the task. Socrative was easy to access and it was easy to make the quiz and launch it (see picture 1 & 2): no technical issues! It’s crucial that the technology works. It was challenging to make appropriate questions and multiple-choice answers. My reflections on how students took the task and their reactions on the interactive moment was that it represented both playful pedagogy and online teaching and learning. The students threw themselves into the quiz and some of them didn’t only compete with themselves but with fellow students. Most of all I found out why they didn’t succeed in the task- only 50% of the students had read the chapter (see picture 3).
What is my best advice?
- Less is more in the beginning (Start with a short quiz in the beginning of the lesson or in the end. It might be quite time consuming to prepare the first task and see how it works with students.)
- Testrun the interactive task with a colleague (maybe even with the most serious colleague; if he/she likes it you are going to succeed; if he/she doesn’t like it you might still succeed)
- Playful learning is not only just fun. (A quiz is a competition for many students and for competitive persons it is serious gaming.)
- Use an interactive platform, which is sustainable. (Once you and your students have learned how to use it, you can all make a progress and teach someone else.)
Starduck1 and Starduck2 built on Rikke Toft Norgard’s workshop “The Potentials of Playful Teaching and Learning”.
Hello, this seems like a playful, but still competitive, way to engage students in reading the course literature. At the same time the students learn both about using digital tools in the classroom which they will benefit from in their future work as teachers. It would be interesting to follow up if a consistent use of Socrative (or similar quizzes) increases students’ deep learning and self-regulation of their independent studying. Your blog post clearly explained how and why you implanted Socrative.
Socrative is well described here. I have never used it, but the screenshots show me that this tool can be very useful. It can for instance indicate how students interact with teaching materials such as assigned readings.
Thanks you for your post. I have never used Socrative, but heard good reviews about it. I think, I’ll use your advice to use the interactive platform, make progress and teach someone else.