Socrative

I'm loving the student response system Socrative! Free and available via website or teacher app & student app. Students use their own devices and watch as their responses appear up on the board. There are plenty of features; I like the Short Answer the best!

This gives every student the opportunity to respond, which increases the number of trial opportunities for a target skill. Students who may feel uncomfortable responding orally may feel more comfortable typing, and still get the opportunity to develop their language skills.

Suggestions to integrate language skills within academics using this tool:
- Explaining and defining: students create definitions for content vocabulary; vote on the clearest most comprehensive definitions
-Analyzing text and supporting with evidence: activities such as determining a character trait or theme and supporting with a piece of evidence from the text
- Summarizing/Main idea: students formulate a one-sentence summary of a chapter, the concept of a lesson, a current event article, a scientific process, etc.
- Math: poll the students and use the responses to determine trends (e.g. percentages, decimals, fractions, ratios, mean, median, mode)
-Collaboration and social pragmatics: working together in groups to formulate one group response to post to the board

Students have also really loved the ability to lead the activities and generate questions that their classmates must answer!