Using Socrative to Engage Your Students

Socrative is an awesome and free student response system that can be used on iPads (Teacher App & Student App) as well as computers through a browser. It is user friendly enough to be used with any grade level. A teacher can import pictures to be part of the questions, therefore even kindergarteners will find it easy to navigate and answer questions.

As a tech integrator I do not use Socrative very often with students, therefore I have scoured through videos and articles to create a one stop shop for information regarding Socrative.

What is Socrative?



Some Uses for Socrative




Socrative for Collaboration



New Features of Socrative





Socrative Tutorial




Other Resources:

1. Three Good Ways to use Socrative in Your Classroom
2. 13 Ways to Use Socrative as a Formative Assessment
3. My Favorite Mobile Apps #2: Socrative (+Lesson Ideas)
4. Socrative Exit Tickets

Moldiv and Pic Collage for Poetry

Today some 5th grade students created Limericks for St. Patrick's Day, however this idea can be used for any holiday or non-holiday poetry.

The classroom teacher, Mrs. Lucy, taught her students how to write limericks and the students spent some time writing before I joined them and demonstrated the highlights of three apps.

Apps Used… All free… 

Art App - Students can draw/create pictures to use in any other application on an iPad. Then save the artwork to the photo gallery from where the creation can be used in another app.

Moldiv - (Creation to the left.) Is a great pic frame type app that the user can import pictures from the photo gallery, customize the frames, and add text. In this example the student chose one frame in order to have enough room for their poem.

Pic Collage - (Creations below.) Is a really great pic collage app. The user can import pictures from their iPad's photo gallery, but also get pics from the web, or add stickers all within the app. Users can get a little more creative with the text as well. For example the limerick below on the left has all the text within yellow text boxes.

 

Once the students finished, they emailed their project to their classroom teacher and myself. If you are lucky enough to have a newer iPad, you can share via airdrop. (Grades 2-3 have this option in our district.)

A couple more examples:

Created with Moldiv

Created with Pic Collage

Students Love it, iMovie!

It shouldn't amaze me how quickly students discover ways to create with any given iOS app, but it still does… I have been using iMovie with 2nd-5th grade students during the last two weeks and they, the students, are fascinated to create using iMovie. Not only are they in love with the app, but it is almost an instinctive app. Students are producing movies about parts of speech, animals they researched, book trailers, president reports, etc. It is amazing to see students so excited about creating something from information they have learned. The beauty is, they will watch their creations over and over, which means the information will really sink in if it had not already during the research and creation process. If students create book trailers, upload the video to YouTube and then make a QR Code to attach to the book that the video is about. Soon enough you will have a library full of books with trailers to entice little readers to read books in your classroom library.

Tutorial Video:
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Student Examples:

Book Trailer (5th Grade)
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Pronouns (3rd Grade)


Adjectives (3rd Grade)
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Elephant Report (3rd Grade)
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Book Review (2nd Grade)


The Snowshoe Hare (4th Grade)
)

President Report (5th Grade)

Teacher Example (Trailer)
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Teacher Example (Movie) )

Story Me for Literacy and Beyond

Story Me (free) is a super fun comic strip creating app for students and teachers alike. With Story Me's intuitive ease of use, students will create comics strips quickly and instinctively to demonstrate their knowledge of subject matter or to enjoy the writing process. Users can choose from a variety of frame styles. Once the project is complete, there are many sharing options available. With the latest (Nov. 2013) iOS devices, AirDrop is my favorite way to share. For older iOS devices, email and Google Drive work nicely.

One of my favorite features of the app is that any picture that the user adds to the comic strip will be cartoonized (Yeah, I made up my own verb.) I love this feature because it makes it easier to post pictures of students. I am less worried about accidentally using a pic of students who do not have permission to have their image posted on the internet. Within the app the cartoon feature can be adjusted from a normal photograph to extreme cartoon.

Student Examples and Inspiration

Students in third grade researched a
person to write a biography about. As a part of their project, the students created a comic strip featuring the person they researched.

In this example the student was playing with the app to learn how to use it. In the end this third grader came up with a humorous way to express themselves and the photos that they took of things within their classroom.

Story Me is a great way to collect digital evidence for different math standards along with any other subject. Have students add their evidence to their digital portfolios.

Second grade students wrote the procedure to making oobleck, a Dr. Seuss science experiment. Story Me is a great application for writing out steps or directions for a variety of things.