Challenge 8 - Socrative and Google Forms

Socrative can be used in a variety of ways during PE classes, providing there is access to a computer.
I created two quizzes to use for my middle school badminton unit. The first quiz was to enable students to reflect on their effort, focus and class preparation, which are items they are graded on throughout the year.
The quiz was designed to target areas that I believe still need to be improved by a number of students and allows some quiet time during class, to reflect on their achievement.
Since students do not bring computers to class, I set up the quiz on my computer and select certain students to sit on the bleachers and complete the quiz. There are several advantages to using this method in a 40-minute PE class:

• It gives students a break from physical activity yet maximizes class time by allowing them to still focus on the unit
• It can be used to allow any students who are off-task to regroup their effort and focus
• It provides students with the opportunity to immediately reflect critically on their performance in class
• For activities (such as badminton) that involve even numbers of students for singles and doubles play, and sometimes involve a short wait time due to space constrictions, it allows students waiting to reflect on their performance instead of going to a fitness station. Essentially, it gives more options in class
• My students often told me that they don't like using the pencil and paper format for class quizzes. The ease of use and interactive dimension of socrative makes it more appealing to them.

The results help me to gage student's self-perception of their effort and focus. So far, the results have been somewhat surprising and in some cases, show a discrepancy between their perception and my perception of their effort. On occasions, the students who I believe to consistently give their best have responded that they could have tried a lot harder! 

A second use for Socrative has been to combat an ongoing problem, particularly in grade 8, of class preparedness; being on time and with correct PE kit. For any students that come in late or without PE kit, I ask them to fill out the 8 question class preparation quiz. It hold them accountable for coming to class unprepared, prompts them to think about why it happened and suggest corrective measures for future success in that area. 

Room number: 351742

I used google forms in a slightly different way. Firstly, I used it to create make-up quizzes for students absent for the pen and paper assessment quiz. This allows them to create the quiz in their own time, from a computer and have the results send directly to me, rather than worrying about finding the piece of paper and bringing it in! I ensure that the answers provoke thought and opinion so that they can't look up the answer or ask someone else. 

Lastly, because this is a very long post, we used google forms at the end of last year to compile a student survey for the PE department. This gave us critical feedback to our program, the student's opinion and suggested areas for improvement. The results we very easy to read and allow for different types of sorting for optimal analysis.