The SRS
competition was actually a really fun day. In it, we were able to compete
against our fellow classmates, working to state that our tool was the best. This
competition taught me a lot about the various tools that we can use in a classroom
as study and review tools. It showed me many more options than I knew previously
existed, so it was really fun learning with my group and my class about the
many different ways we as educators can make reviewing fun for our students.
My group presented on Quizizz,
a program that creates quizzes in the form of an online game. In this tool, like
many others, you are able to sign in, make your own questions for a
personalized quiz, and control who joins the quiz due to an access code. You
can use a number of formats and templates that have already been made for you,
or you can form your own quiz. Each question is divided up nicely and you are
able to insert pictures into your questions as well. With this level of
customization and flexibility, it is easy for a teacher to put a lot of
questions on a given quiz. Another awesome feature is the fact that students
can go at their own pace, yet still feel like they all have an equal chance of
winning. It allows for the “game” part of the review to be fun and fair. At the
end, you can view the leaderboard, assess grades, and see which questions were
the hardest for each student, either individually or collectively. You can also
download a spreadsheet of all types of facts concerning problems and
participants. You can also email parents with any concerns that you might have
if the child is not doing well on any of the activities.
One of the other presentations was on the tool Socrative. This tool was very similar to
Quizizz in that you can design review quizzes quickly and easily. One unique
and exciting feature of this tool is that there is a “race” function in which
you can divide the class into teams and they can compete against each other to
see who answers the most questions the fastest. This is an effective way to
possibly make kids want to learn their materials better and to be able to win
the competition if they understand more. This could be an incentive to some of
them. On the flip side, it could also make other kids feel bad if they do not
win the competition, so using it in a younger classroom may not be the best
idea if they get too competitive. Another shortcoming of this tool is that it does
not give as many precise results. Overall, it was an enjoyable tool to use.
One last tool that I enjoyed using was called GoSoapBox. The strengths of this site
showed immediately. Once we entered the code for the “classroom”, we were directed
into a menu that contained all the activities that the teacher had made for us.
Once on the menu, we could do a number
of things. We could follow the teachers instructions and go through quizzes that
were previously set up. We could take part in a poll. We could ask questions in
a section near the bottom of the menu and add comments to other people’s
questions if we had the answer. Another great part of this tool was that people
could tell the teacher anonymously if they were confused using an option at the
top of the menu. This tool is extremely helpful in that a teacher could see
that and halt the progression of the class whenever there were people who
needed to catch up. One shortcoming of this tool was that there was no filter.
Kids could comment whatever they wanted in certain sections and the monitoring
of that would take more effort than would be able to be given.
As a whole, this presentation showed me a lot of new and fun
options for us as teachers to use in our classrooms someday. Many of these
tools have parts that are very similar, but each has their own specialty. Since
there are so many good tools to use, a teacher can add variety, fun, and
learning to their lessons and classrooms.
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