Buzzing about Socrative!

Yesterday marked the first day I used Socrative in class. I'm sure several of you may have used or are using it frequently in class, but, for whatever reasons, this was my first step into the waters of using BYOD in class. I put together several multiple-choice questions together on the short story "Contents of the Dead Man's Pockets"d and had students partner to complete the quiz at their own pace. As Liz Calderwood has used Socrative with our students already, they came in all set to go, only asking for the room number to access the material. If I could sum up the response in three words: Everybody love it! The students were on task, active, and able to interact and collaborate on the material. The application allows the teacher to monitor each group's progress and provides results that are easily downloaded. What I found, however, was that more students were attentive to and engaged in our discussion of the questions after they had completed them on Socrative and the deeper discussions we had about the story that resulted. Socrative offers a variety of options as well that include test formats to polls to short written responses. I see endless ways of dovetailing this interactive application into my classroom teaching to engage my students, increase their collaboration and participation, and monitor the progress of their learning. I also continue to use Edmodo as our learning hub, and partnering up with social studies -- where the students are learning about the Bill of Rights and the Amendments -- we have applied several of these in mini-research topics in English. For example, we explored the topic of flag burning as an expression of free speech, then continued with listening to the Dixie Chicks' song "Not Ready to Make Nice," after which the students learned the story behind the song online. Many of the students expressed their surprise and interest in this kind of research. Now we are considering the Establishment Clause, known better as the separation of church and state, and the controversy of the words "under God" in the "Pledge of Allegiance." Enthusiasm was tepid intinitially until I had them follow a recitation of the pledge in which I replaced "under God" with "under Allah." That fired up quite a bit of interest, to say the least. Now I have the students preparing for an in-class debate next week. I have posted several balanced links to resources on Edmodo, one of those being Pro/Con.org , which offers links to resources to BOTH sides of several controversial issues such as the Pledge controvery. I have told them to come prepared like lawyers to a trial with facts and evidence to support their side and to be prepared to counter the other sides' arguments. Further, students will have their smartphones on hand to do more fact finding during the debate, too. And all this from a teacher who once had a stranglehold over students NOT to bring cell phones into class! The world, and most certainly the landscape of learning, is changing, indeed!