Module 6: Student Response Systems

The concept of Student Response Systems (SRS) was pretty new to me. I had experience with course management systems (CMS) such as Managebac and Moodle, but never in the smaller scale of SRS. Having more variety in SRS, I enjoyed exploring each one of them and comparing which ones I like best.

I really enjoyed Socrative in it's format and features. It is first of all really easy to use. Making quizzes is effortless through this SRS program, making it easy for busy teachers to use and set up. There are also different modes that lets the teachers control the pacing and use it for a variety of assessments, along with being able to track student's progress live. I think this feature is important because then we can clearly see which questions the students are struggling with and then either go address it to the entire class if it is a common occurrence, or work with one or two kids that could be seen struggling. Looking at this data live would also enable teachers to see how the students pace themselves through this assignment.

Other SRS are also cool, such as AnswerGarden and PollEverywhere, as more and more of my professors have used it in my classes. PollEverywhere is pretty great because they allow text response, which is great for older students or large group settings where the audience does not necessarily have a smartphone/tablet/laptop with them but could depend on the availability of phones that text. AnswerGarden is another system that asks students what they think about a subject or a question and those short responses are then arranged in a word cloud. This is pretty brilliant in my opinion, as it brings the students back to the classroom with technology rather than having the students get distracted out of the classroom by technology. It allows the teacher to see what the students are thinking collectively, and discuss why the students think that way. Though in comparison to Socrative, PollEverywhere and AnswerGarden lets the students be anonymous. This could be an issue when we want to track down an individual's participation and progress, but could also be beneficial when wanting to hear different opinions, especially those who are usually shy or unwilling to share.

I think it'll be interesting to see CMS such as Moodle work together with a SRS such as Socrative. It'll be nice for the students and teachers to not have multiple accounts and passwords to remember, and to have all the data from the SRS centralized and all put together.