Socrative & Kahoot!

"Socrative empowers you to engage and assess your students as learning happens. Through the use of real-time questioning, result aggregation, and visualization, you have instant insight into levels of understanding so you can use class time to better collaborate and grow as a community of learners." (Socrative, 2015)

Socrative is a piece of software no dissimilar to Nearpod in that it is run on multiple devices by the students and controlled by the lecturer. Unlike Nearpod its sole function is to run quizzes, after which the data can be assessed by the lecturer. The types of quizzes available are the usual options of multiple choice, true/false, text-box submission etc, but there are a few ways of implementing them.

• The Standard Quiz is where you can build up a quiz and then have the students work through the questions.
• The Quick Question is a method of quickly posing a question mid-class.
• The Space Race is a mini-game style quiz where teams will race to answer questions to be the first to reach a designated score.
• Exit Ticket allows you to run a quiz where, upon completion, students are then allowed to leave the classroom, but not until they have all the correct answers.

Where this differs to Nearpod is that it doesn't contain any presentation element, so it's purely an assessment based application; but this is not necessarily a downfall. With nearpod you're somewhat steered down the path of conducting the entire lesson using it; with Socrative you can just use it to augment a lesson - jumping back and forth between conventional teaching methods and the Socrative software. In my personal opinion this is a more preferable approach as it allows you to move away from the presentation side of things whilst still getting the feedback that software based assessments give.

"A Kahoot is a learning game created on the Kahoot! platform, which consists of multiple choice questions - as a quiz, discussion or survey - in any topic, language or ability. It’s projected at the front of the classroom, & played by the whole class together in real-time (answering on their own personal device)" (Kahoot, 2015)

Kahoot is similar to Socrative in that it is an application based quiz program, but it is quite obviously targeted towards a younger audience - it's full of bright colours and cartoon fonts. The format is the same: Input your questions, pick the right answer, link your students to the quiz, analyse results. However, the results don't go as in-depth as they are in Socrative.

In my experience of using it, the software is a little buggy. I made 2 quizzes when testing it out and both times the final quiz didn't actually display any text for the optional answers, just colours. I'm are this was probably easy to fix, but to be completely honest I had already lost interest in the software.

There's really not much more to say on Kahoot - it's a education quiz program aimed at a younger audience. I would say that it's almost definitely aimed at an audience too young for Higher Education; I would designate it as being designed more for a pre-teen audience.

In conclusion - I could see myself using Socrative within certain lectures, but not Kahoot, 

References

Kahoot. 2015. Kahoot. [ONLINE] Available at: https://getkahoot.com/tutorials/Kahoot_Tutorials.pdf. [Accessed 13 November 2015].

Socrative. 2015. Socrative. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.socrative.com. [Accessed 13 November 2015].