Kelly Walsh over at EmergingEdTech seems like quite the Ed Tech advocate and he has started an ongoing series of posts for the next three months focusing on a range of tools.

He has asked people to try the tool and post some comments on his blog. So, what the hell, I’m happy to see where this might go. First up is a basic classroom quiz tool called Socrative.

At first glance, this reminds me of Kahoot, which I’ve looked at before. Socrative appears to use a more serious design style, eschewing the bright colours and shapes of Kahoot for more muted tones. Overall, the Socrative interface is a little more user friendly for both the student and teacher, with a clean, simple and logical design.

Creating a basic quiz in Socrative was a very straight-forward process and it was nice to be able to create all of the questions on the same page. I did encounter some problems with creating a multichoice question – for some reason it took repeated clicks (and some swearing) in the answer field before I was able to add answers. Editing the name of the quiz wasn’t intuitive either but overall, the process was simpler than with Kahoot.

Running the quiz went reasonably well however I did encounter a number of bugs, related to network connectivity (3G) and an initially buggy version of the quiz that seemed to crash the entire system. (I had inadvertently added a true/false question twice, once with no correct answer identified. Clumsy perhaps on my part but I would kind of expect this to be picked up by the tool itself).

I liked the fact that the student sees both the questions and the answers on their phone and that the feedback appears there as well. Socrates gives three options for running the quiz – Student paced with immediate feedback (correct answers shown on device upon answering), Student paced – student navigation (student works through all questions and clicks submit at the end) and Teacher paced where the teacher takes students through question by question. In the final two options, feedback appears only on the teacher’s computer (presumably connected to a data project / smart board).

Overall I’d say I rate the overall usability, look and feel of Socrative above Kahoot but the connectivity issues are a concern and I’d say that Kahoot offers a slightly more fun experience for learners by playing up the gamified experience, with timers and scoring.