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In this issue:
LEADERSHIP UPDATES
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FROM THE PRESIDENT: COMMUNICATE, COLLABORATE, CREATE
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GROWING THROUGH THE YEARS: A LETTER FROM THE PAST CHAIR
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MEET ELIZABETH: NEWEST MEMBER OF THE ALC
GET READY FOR THE BEST OF AFFILIATES' SESSIONS
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MAKING SMARTPHONES AND TABLETS WORK TOWARD, NOT AGAINST, CLASSROOM EFFICACY
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PLANNING FOR LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION WITH COMMON CORE STANDARDS
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FLIPPING THE CLASSROOM TO TEACH ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES
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ENCOURAGING MINDFULNESS THROUGH ACTIVE LEARNING
SHARING FROM AROUND THE GLOBE
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OUTREACH, SERVICE, AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: REFLECTIONS ON NILETESOL, JANUARY 2015-2016
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PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT 2.0: BEYOND THE CONFERENCE
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CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING (CLIL): EMERGING COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION
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TEACHERS: THE MODERN AGE DINOSAURS
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TESOL PRESIDENT ANDY CURTIS VISITS AFFILIATE BELTA
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FIFTY YEARS GROWING TOGETHER
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GLOBAL COMPETENCE IN THE ELT CLASSROOM
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NEWS FROM NYS TESOL
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SOCIAL MEDIA FOR TEACHERS: TWITTER FOR PROFESSIONAL GROWTH
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10 WAYS TO USE SOCRATIVE
CORRECTIONS
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CORRECTION FROM AFFILIATE NEWS, DECEMBER 2015
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10 WAYS TO USE SOCRATIVE
Jeremy Levin, TESOL France, Lille, France
What Is Socrative?
Socrative delivers simple technology to
enable instant classroom engagement, assessment, and personalization through
educational exercises, games, and other tools. This app allows teachers to
receive feedback from their students in real time so they can personalize
instruction. From quizzing, races, and live polling to peer feedback, Socrative
is a powerful technological tool that can not only liven up classes, but also
make life easier for teachers. All you and your students need is a device with
an Internet connection, and you’re ready to go!
- Quizzes
This
is by far the most popular use for Socrative. Teachers can create or import
ready-made quizzes into their account and test their students on any content
they wish. There are three question formats: multiple choice, true/false, and short
answer. Teachers can either create their quizzes online directly on the easy-to-use
Socrative platform or download an Excel template that can be uploaded later.
- Races
The
race function is just an extension of the quiz function. The users see the
regular quiz on their device while the teacher can project another screen which
displays colored bars that represent each user. Students can see their color
directly on their device so that they know which bar corresponds to them.
Spaceships, bicylces, bumble bees, bears, and unicorns can also be selected as
icons for an extra fun element on the progress bars.
When
the user answers correctly, their colored bar and icon move forward. The first
team to get their progress bar all the way to the end wins. Caution! Just
because a user answers his or her questions the fastest doesn’t necessarily
mean that he or she will win the race. Accuracy is also important! It’s a
modern day ed-tech version of the tortoise and the hare. Up to 25 users can be
selected for the race.
Often,
I have my students take the quiz first in regular mode individually and then
immediately after pair them up or put them into small teams for the race, which
is actually the second time that they will have taken that particular quiz. Doing
so is a nice way of solidifying what they have just learnt while adding a
little bit of friendly competition.
- Brainstorming
Often,
when I demonstrate how brainstorming can be done with Socrative, I ask the
users to think of as many pizza toppings as they can. Within seconds, we can
see a multitude of input from every user. I’ve seen users suggest pizza
toppings range from mushrooms to cats! The nice thing is that everyone has a
voice and can say what they want. Also, the teacher can see which user says
what comment so it is easy to monitor and immediately delete any kind of
inappropriate comment.
- Polling
To
follow up from the example of brainstorming pizza toppings, what I do next is
first delete any duplicates from the list. That way there’s just one of each
suggested pizza topping. Once that’s done, I click on “Vote Now,” and the users
then have to select just one. With this we can see the real-time results and
percentages for what pizza topping the group likes most. Whether you need to
make a quick vote or elect a class president, the live polling function from
Socrative can be adapted to any situation you like.
- Collecting
Information From the Group Quickly
Having
a “Short Answer” box for users to input anything you ask them gives you endless
possibilities for ways of gathering information from a group. In one of my
workshops, I wanted to find a quick and practical way of getting everyone’s
email address. Rather than handing out a piece of paper that people scribble
their address on, I just asked everyone to type in their email in the short
answer box on their own device. Instantly, I had every email address from the
entire group. Then I proceeded to close the “quiz” and selected the option to
download the Excel file (which included all the data that I had just gathered),
highlighted the column with their email addresses, and then simply copied and
pasted them all with a single click into the “send to” box in a new message in
my email account.
- Peer Feedback and
Evaluation
Ever
have difficulty keeping your students attentive while others are giving a
presentation? Creating a positive peer feedback environment can be a really
insightful experience for students. Using Socrative for peer feedback is a
quick and paperless way of gathering a group’s feedback. You could set up all
sorts of questions to prompt comments on targeted criteria such as body language,
visuals, content, and more, but what I find most effective is just leaving an
open comment box for students to express themselves freely on whatever they
have observed. You can also hide the students’ names so as to make the comments
anonymous, which also gives students more confidence to write what they truly
think.
- Projecting Your Own
Twitter-like Live Feed
Because
users can input anything they want into the short answer question boxes, you
can simply project the live results, which display comments as they are
submitted. I once went to a wedding where the bride and groom asked everyone to
tweet using #JoeandCynthia.
During the dinner, they projected the twitter feed. Granted, some poorly
written drunk messages slipped through, but overall it was a nice way of
interacting and sending congratulatory messages to the couple. Because users
only need the “Teacher’s Room Number” to have access, this could be a good
solution for those who want to project live feeds but don’t want to ask
everyone to sign up for a Twitter account.
- Paperless and
Anonymous Creative Writing
When
I was in high school, I had a creative writing class and really enjoyed writing
poetry. The only drawback was that I was often too terrified to share my work. Again,
having anonymous open comment boxes can be a stress-free way for students to
express themselves. Have 20 students in your group? Just setup 20 short answer
questions, assign each student to a number, and have them write their work in
that particular number’s comment box. You can hide the students’ names to keep
their identities safe, while as the teacher you can still see who is
responsible for each comment.
- Interactive Guided
Teacher Lectures and/or Discussions
With
the Teacher Paced option, you can choose when the next question is to be
prompted on the user’s device. Imagine you’re giving a lecture on the BP oil
spill disaster that took place in 2010. You could start off by having them
guess how many gallons of oil were leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. Once the
users see the answer, you could explain how such a disaster happened and how it
was caused. Before moving on, see if the students have understood you by giving
them a simple multiple-choice question about what originally caused the oil
spill. Next, brainstorm all the stakeholders who were affected by the disaster.
Discuss the suggestions. “How did this spill affect the tourism industry along
the Gulf of Mexico? The fishermen? The BP shareholders?” Then, why not prompt a
quick true or false statement: “BP’s stock increased after the oil spill.”
Doing
this type of guided lecture with Socrative can not only help the teacher know
if the group has understood and paid attention to the lesson, but it also
creates an element of interaction where each participant feels as though he or
she is contributing.
- Importing Quizzes
There
are millions of Socrative users all over the world. Collaborative and sharing
communities have flourished, because it’s so easy to import other people’s
quizzes into your account. Socrative Garden is a great blog that not only posts
Socrative tips and techniques but has also created a widely used Google Doc
where people share their quizzes. Are you a busy teacher who doesn’t have any
time to write and create quizzes? No problem, just copy and paste the SOC code
in the import quiz section of your account, and presto! You now have a quiz
that is ready to be used. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend just blindly using
other people’s quizzes. One should check the quality of the content before
putting it to use, but if that’s all that has to be done, then doing this can
certainly save you valuable preparation time.
With an American
father and French mother, Jeremy
Levin has been split
between two cultures and two languages his entire life. Born and raised on the
outskirts of Philadelphia, Jeremy moved to Lille, France in 2003. With a bachelor’s
in French-English language studies, it made sense for him to start his career
in translation, but he soon realized that something was missing, and it was
that he’d rather work with people than sit behind a computer screen all day. His
teaching career began in 2006, and it has become his passion ever since. Jeremy
specializes in grammar games and educational technology. He loves finding ways
of making subjects that people typically think are boring into something fun. When
he’s not teaching, you may find him working on his electronic music mixes, his
second passion in life.
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