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Assessment aids

Work was being... well, work today, so I've had to skip this week's lectures. Apparently the topic was to be 'assessment aids', in particular two utilities, Kahoot and Socrative. Let's take a look.

Socrative

http://www.socrative.com/

Socrative is a live, on-line quiz/feedback platform that lets you create various types of challenge for students, such as multiple choice, true/false or questionnaires. Students' responses are fed back to the tutor immediately. It's a bit like classroom Who Wants to be a Millionaire with you as Chris Tarrant and no money. There are team options, such as a first-past-the-post rockets game and single shot questions. The whole thing works on pretty much every device from PCs to phones, so you can even have large cohorts joining in. If I have any complaints I'd like a bit more theming options to help me use it with various different learner groups and there are some annoying usability decisions (e.g. if you accidentally create a quiz you have to add a title and at least one question before you can back out then delete it).

Kahoot

https://getkahoot.com/

This one is pretty fun! Like Socrative, Kahoot lets you create on-line quizzes. Kahoot takes the engagement level up a notch by adding in better pacing and alluring graphics and music that build up drama and make it feel even more like a game show. I imagine it's great with younger learners, but even us adults find it fun when we've used it. I will say though it doesn't do a good job dealing with poor Internet connections - a lot of our teaching spaces have a weak 3G/4G signal and temperamental WiFi, and whenever we would drop off the game took a long time to even realise something was up. If everybody is on a good connection it's great though.

Here's a comparision article about both Kahoot and Socrative: https://3rs4teachers.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/2_tools_are_better_than_one/

While looking into these tools I found a great blog post from Vicki Davis that took a look at those and some others, in particular a very interesting looking v-learning website called Zaption:

Zaption

https://www.zaption.com/

Zaption lets you take videos (most conveniently on YouTube but there are other options) and turn them into a teaching tool by embedding overlays and quizzes that can control the playback. I could record a demonstration and publish it to YouTube, then use Zaption to turn it into an interactive e-learning session. I haven't been able to go into it in depth yet, but it sounds like a fantastic tool and the basic version is free as well. I hope it gives enough flexibility to cater to a variety of needs - I've tried a few examples and they're great but not as flexible and dynamic as the kinds of things I imagine I'd do with it.

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