ESC516 Web

Pedagogies
Assessment 1 Evaluation
Criteria, Report and Module
Activities.
Student: Brad Murphy
Number: 11513914

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Table of Contents.
Contents
ESC516 Web Pedagogies................................................................................1
Table of Contents................................................................................................... 2
Part A: URL and Screen Shot.................................................................................. 3
Part B: Critical evaluation and justification of a web 2.0 tool.................................4
Introduction........................................................................................................ 4
1.

Discussion of a web pedagogy: Socrative....................................................5

Title, URL and Screenshot................................................................................ 5
Grade, Curriculum Area, and Outcomes..........................................................5
Effective use of socrative in the Science Curriculum.......................................6
Question 18 addressing student outcomes a & d (see previous page):.......6

2.

Critical evaluation of Socrative using criteria...............................................7

Criteria 1: Educational goals............................................................................7
Criteria 2: Access............................................................................................. 7
Criteria 3: Efficiency........................................................................................ 9
Criteria 5. Learning Styles & Levels...............................................................11

3.

Critical justification of the pedagogical suitability of Socrative..................12

4.

Critical discussion of broader pedagogical issues in the classroom...........15

Reference List...................................................................................................... 16
Appendix.............................................................................................................. 18
Socrative email support.................................................................................... 18
Socrative Motion quiz excel............................................................................18
Socrative pdf quiz answer download................................................................18

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Part A: URL and Screen Shot

http://prezi.com/e6fkbm6jrh24/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

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Part B: Critical evaluation and justification of a web 2.0

tool.
Introduction
The availability of evidence and analysis of student prior learning,
current, and anticipated progress is likely to be a revolutionising aspect
of the development of the teaching profession.
Louise Starkey 2012
Bold words regarding the development of web 2.0 tools allowing the educator
instant access to student work synchronously with them actually performing the
task! This is revolutionary however only through sound pedagogical practice of
such technology will it result in such an educational revolution.
Web 2.0 tools, used well, encourage collaboration and engagement (Johnson
2009). Socrative is one such tool that allows instant access and analysis of both
formative and summative assessment and is a tool that has great potential. The
success of such a tool however, is not in the tool itself, but in the teachers use of
the tool. It is important to consider pedagogy before technology (Watson &
McIntyre). It is the use of this web 2.0 tool and pedagogical suitability in the
context of a stage five NSW Science classroom the will be the focus of this
report.

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1. Discussion of a web pedagogy: Socrative

Title, URL and Screenshot
Socrative can be found at http://www.socrative.com/. Reaching this page the
teacher clicks teacher-login and the student student-login. The teachers
account room code becomes the student login to get to quizzes.

Grade, Curriculum Area, and Outcomes

The curriculum area focused upon in this report for a grade 10 class is Physical
World (PW) outcomes and content in the NSW Syllabus for the Australian
Curriculum (Science)

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(Board of Studies, 2012, p. 122).

Effective use of socrative in the Science Curriculum

Considering Socrative is a clicker-style quiz based web 2.0 tool the outcomes
focused upon were that of content. Desiring specific student data makes this an
excellent classroom tool (Gillispie 2014). It can be used to engage students in
either formative or summative assessment and has a limit of fifty simultaneous
classroom users (Deichman, 2014) meaning it can be easily accommodated for
an average class size. This area of the science curriculum contains specialised
terminology with words that have a general meaning in common usage and a
specific meaning in Science. Because of this misconceptions are common and
easily missed by the teacher. An example of this is with the terms mass and
weight. In everyday speak we say I weigh 82kg, however in science mass is
measured in kilograms and weight (which is a force) is in Newtons. As such
students are often confused by such terms as revealed by Socrative.

Question 18 addressing student outcomes a & d (see previous page):

Above is a screenshot of the results of a year 10 Socrative Space Race Quiz for
question 18 of 20; students were placed into 6 teams with only one out of six
answering correctly. Despite the question having the correct numerical answer
for ALL responses most students answered kilograms rather than Newtons; a
common misconception. Because the results of the quiz are seen live by the
teacher this misconception was picked up immediately and addressed with them
promptly. There is nothing like real-time feedback to determine if students really
understand the content (Yearwood 2012). This is an excellent example of where
Socrative can help make students aware of their level of knowledge facilitating
correct conceptual understanding (Awedh, Mueen, Zafar, & Manzoor, 2014). As
such Socrative is well placed to assist students in achieving the outcome of
applying models, theories and laws to explain situations involvingforce and
student outcomes a and d listed on the previous page. Such affordances, and

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limitations, of Socrative will be discussed further in terms of evaluation criteria

and pedagogical suitability.

2. Critical evaluation of Socrative using criteria.

Pedagogical reasoning is a process undertaken by an educator when forming
teaching decisions before, during, and after student learning (Starkey 2012). In
the context of evaluating Socratives suitability to my specific context four out of
five criteria considered in part A are used below.

Criteria 1: Educational goals

To get the best from collaborative technologies educators must start with
educational requirements in terms of teachers and students needs ensuring that
the pedagogy exploits the technology rather than the other way around
(Laurillard 2009). Each tool must be evaluated against teaching aims (Starkey
2012). Internet activities should be directly related to curricular standards using
the Understanding by (backwards) Design framework (Nelson 2007). Being an
interactive quiz based tool it is very easy to tailor the activity to learning
outcomes as demonstrated by the discussion of question 18. Considering that
Socrative allows for immediate feedback ensures students are not ingraining
misconceptions (Nelson 2007). This, done correctly, will generate discussion
taking learning beyond the superficial allowing deeper learning to take place.
Caution needs to be exercised here with not using Socrative as merely an online
version of a pen and paper quiz as multiple-choice recall style questions, though
engaging, can take up more time than quality classroom dialogue which can, in
less time, achieve the same learning outcomes (Simmons & Hawkins, 2009) at a
deeper level.

Criteria 2: Access
Socrative is very accessible to both students and teachers on many levels.
Although web tools have allowed easy access and production of huge amounts of
information the negative is that this has resulted in information overload (Conole,
2004). A major affordance from the teacher perspective is that Socrative
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integrates with existing tools to help deal with such information. Individual
student or group results can be downloaded as an excel file or google sheet
showing clearly correct and incorrect answers highlighted green and red
respectively as shown below.

At a quick glance the teacher can see how the class did as a whole for each
question as well as how each student/group did. Adding to the data richness is
the fact that with one click the teacher can download all this along with a pdf of
each students/group individual result, part of which is shown below:

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Such ease of access to automatically generate rich data makes socrative a very
powerful tool leading to analysis of student understanding, both formative and
summative, that could not be done with just giving a quiz or just using excel or
pdf documents on their own. Such collaboration of digital tools enables the
teacher to do more than what would be done independently (Chan 2011). Its
amazing that such a tool is available for free and there is no indication that this
will change any time soon. Also the tool is regularly updated in terms of
computer and tablet apps and there is an excellent help desk who replies to
emails promptly, see appendix.
Socrative is compatible with PCs, Macs, iPad, android tablets (Yearwood 2012),
windows tablets and equivalent smart phones (Awedh, et al. 2014). Students can
access a running quiz from any of these devices and Socrative offers the most
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flexibility and ease of use of any free web-based student response system tool
(Walsh, 2014).

Criteria 3: Efficiency
Efficiency has to do with the speed of the website loading, speed of information
access, and ease of navigation. The efficiency of a website in the classroom is
paramount to minimize student distraction. If the website is cumbersome then
students and teachers will become impatient and it will disrupt the flow of
learning. Thought must be placed upon the organisation and speed of the
website when assessing its suitability (Johnson and Lamb 2007). If the
information is not quick to access then it may not be a good option. As Nelson
(2007, p.9) argues, Students might not wait for two minutes for a page to load
before they will find other things to occupy their time.

Socrative is an efficient website continually improving all the time backed up by

a study where students interviewed indicated that the structure of the website
was easy to understand and the quiz easy to answer (Awedh, et al. 2014).
Socrative, therefore has a user-friendly design (iRubric 2011) which is easy to
navigate with convenient easy to use features. Considering Socrative compiles
all student answers and presents it to the teachers screen (Yearwood 2012)
either live or post quiz it is efficient for the teacher. All calculations of
student/group results are done by Socrative, so long as it is a multiple choice,
true or false, or one word answer question. The latter of the three however
requires careful construction to ensure the students clearly put in the answer
required.

Multiple-choice and true/false questions appear as live graphs while shortresponses appear as students type them (Gillispie 2014).

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(Gillispe 2014, p178)

The time invested in setting up a socrative quiz is more than paid back in the
teacher not needing to enter and manipulate data.
With my use of Socrative in the classroom I have found it very reliable, especially
with the space race activities where only 8 groups, hence 8 computers, are used.
It has an official limit of 50 simultaneous online users per room. Most of the
time it works very well with 30 students at once working on an individual quiz
however at times 2 or 3 students have had lag issues where they had to reload
the question.
Socrative does have limitations regarding access to data depending upon which
mode it is in which is important for the teacher to know. For instance if a single
question activity is started which is aimed at the teacher asking a question of
the class orally or written on the board there is no access to what individual
students answer. Though this is excellent for polling a class in an interactive
manner to see what the class knows or thinks overall individual data is not
available. In order to get individual data quiz mode must be run (Gillispie 2014).

Criteria 5. Learning Styles & Levels

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This criteria encompasses Multiple Intelligence (MI)/Blooms/Krathwohl Taxonomy

(BT). In assessing web-tools useful questions to ask include: does the website
activate more than 1 multiple intelligence? (Nelson 2007 p9); does it allow for a
range of thinking skills from lower order (LOTS) to higher order (HOTS) (Chan
2011). Some sites will allow a broad range while others will be narrow. Selecting
a site or tool based upon this will depend upon what you want the students to
get out of it which comes back to criteria 1, Goals. Nevertheless it is important to
consider MI and BT together when designing any teaching experience, including
the use of web 2.0 tools. Simmons and Hawkins (2009) warn that it is easy for
classroom practitioners to focus on the bottom two aspects of BT but lessons
become more engaging when HOTS are included. The starting point must be
good pedagogy, we need to focus on the cognitive needs of students (Mavridi
2013), not the tool, in developing lifelong learners with critical thinking skills and
good digital citizenship. Socrative in itself has no learning styles and levels built
in as it is a tool where the teacher writes the questions. In designing the
questions the teacher should keep in mind a range of levels from LOTS to HOTS.

(Chan 2011)
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Socrative is not a web 2.0 tool that can be used by students to create anything
and is limited in allowing student evaluation, though this could be done with
images embedded with questions (Deichman 2014). Where Socrative is more
limited is in MI. Despite Deichman (2014) acknowledging that Socrative
accommodates different learning styles as it has the ability to add pictures to
each question, this is very limited in scope. Hence in order to address HOTS and
a range of learning styles other tools are needed; this issue is discussed further
in the next section.

3. Critical justification of the pedagogical suitability of Socrative.

Educational technology must be suitable to the unique context, be motivational,
promote learning at the appropriate level, and address curriculum objectives
(Shelly and Gunter 2012). Socrative is capable of this through interactive lessons
that can easily be administered as formative assessment due to its capability of
collecting student responses in real time. Students needs can be determined on
the spot and necessary interventions and enrichment opportunities, for students
who master content, could then be delivered (Shelly and Gunter 2012). How
formative assessment is delivered must be thought through carefully to ensure
the formative role of socrative is not compromised (Gikandi, Morrow, and Davis
2011) by teacher or student prompting. The use of Socrative with year 10 has be
proven to be suitable in the learning of Science. Used correctly Socrative can
help the teacher diagnose misconceptions (discussed in regards to Q18) in
individual/group thinking and address it either immediately or soon after.
Socrative can be set in such a way that students can go at their own pace,
answer any question in any order, get instant feedback and then adjust their
answers accordingly. In this mode Socrative can act as an intellectual scaffold
however it alone cannot create a positive cognitive change (McInerney and
McInerney 2002), the teacher provides the pedagogical framework. What is most
beneficial is the teacher can monitor students in real time and provide feedback,
as part of formative assessment. A summative pedagogy can also be set where
students cannot go back and answer questions or see the answers, more akin to
a traditional test. Whatever mode the teacher chooses Socrative is a powerful
tool to help the teacher provide scaffolding for students to reach their Zone of
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Proximal Development, the Vygotskian solution to the constructivist learning

paradox (Clara and Barbera 2013).

A major benefit with Socrative are students intimidated by contributing in front of

large groups are more likely to do so anonymously (John and Wheeler 2008) in
the single question mode. This is supported by a study from Pamela Walsh (2014
p101) where a few students comments included I feel comfortable responding
to content questionsrather than responding out loud. An excellent
pedagogical use of socrative in addressing the technical aspects of the outcomes
in this part of the stage 5 Science curriculum is to use the single question format
to encourage students to discuss ideas, give opinions, and critically debate a
point of view as part of a live poll. This is where Socrative can encourage
students to cognitively process questions asked by the teacher increasing
collaborative participation (Awedh, et al. 2014).
The Socrative quiz Motion was effective in determining group
strengths/weaknesses of the student outcomes already outlined. The
downloaded spreadsheet showed outcomes c and d need extra work with
averages below 50%.

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Where the quiz fell short was in not assessing the HOTS partly due to teacher
design. The questions only tested up to application as there were calculation
questions. A simple way to include analysis would be to include diagrams for
students to compare.

(Lord & Baviskar 2007, p43)

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Lack of HOTS in tests is not unusual as shown below and in multiple choice
quizzes it would be difficult to reach the two highest levels; arguably an inherent
limitation of Socrative summative quizzing and multiple choice tests in general
(Simmons & Hawkins (2009).

(Lord & Baviskar 2007, p44)

Counter to the claim of multiple choice not being sufficient to assess higher
levels, though difficult to construct, it is not outside of the capabilities of a
multiple choice test to do so (Lord & Baviskar 2007). Having said this deigning
such well-crafted tests on their own is insufficient. Students must be challenged
in their thinking during class via active inquiry (Lord & Baviskar 2007).

4. Critical discussion of broader pedagogical issues in the

classroom.
Digital fluency of students is exaggerated (Crook 2011), despite some young
people using web 2.0 in effective ways, these are the minority. Therefore, it is
important that the teacher is a support to the students in order for their use to
be more sophisticated in support of their learning (Luckin 2009). However due to
the simple intuitive nature of the program this is not a major issue. What is
important in terms of classroom management is having a plan in place for when,
how and where this tool is to be used (Yearwood 2012). When this tool was first
used by year ten some students entered inappropriate names so expectations
were outlined for acceptable use. An affordance from a management perspective
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is that the teacher can clearly see what students/groups are up to live (Gillispie
2014). One lesson with year ten I noticed a student was significantly behind the
others in his questions and so was encouraged to focus more on his work. This
was picked up far sooner than if a traditional mode was used.
Socrative is an excellent tool as part of Evidence Based Teaching where
evidence of learning (Starkey 2012) such as through the live answers gives the
teacher valuable information to refine professional practice on the spot.
Socrative can be used powerfully here in what is known as Back-channeling.
This is where a virtual room can be set up for students to pose questions or
comments regarding concepts in real-time which can be used to generate
discussion and collaboration (Socrative Garden 2015)
Socrative is an excellent web 2.0 tool that offers a lot of benefits to teachers and
students in the modern classroom and look forward in using it more in future.

Reference List
Awedh, M., Mueen, A., Zafar, B., & Manzoor, U. (2014, December). Using
Socrative and smartphones for the support of collaborative learning.
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Board of Studies, N. (2012). Science K-10 Syllabus. Science K-10 Syllabus.
Sydney, NSW, Australia: Board of Studies NSW.
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an Appropriate Tool. Retrieved from Online Learning Consortium:
http://sloanconsortium.org/Web_2.0_Selection_Criteria_Save_Time_Choosin
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http://techpudding.com/2011/04/04/checklist-for-evaluating-technology-softwareand-applications/
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Conole, G. D. (2004). What are the affordances of information and

communication technologies? ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology,
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Shelly, G., Gunter, G., & Gunter, R. (2012). Teachers discovering computers:
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Appendix
Socrative email support

Socrative Support
emails.pdf

Socrative Motion quiz excel

motion quiz
excel.xlsx

Socrative pdf quiz answer download

Question_02_04_20
15__11_09_SR_motion.pdf

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