Kahoot and Socrative as online tools for testing

This presentation was given by Marijana Smolcec who I feel certain is another webhead that I met online a few years ago. First of all she pointed out the most important thing for people like me and that is that both of these tools are free. Then she told us that she was inspired to try Kahoot by a blog article written by Arjana Blazic.

The wordle above gives many of the reasons to use these types of tools, the main ones are that feedback is immediate and students find the tools engaging. They are also very easy to use.

Kahoot is a tool which you can use for quizzes, discussions and surveys. You need to open an account on getkahoot.com. Then the students need to go to kahoot.it in order to enter the quizzes/activities.

With Kahoot you can add pictures and videos, specifying start and end times, as well as ordinary text. You can edit your quiz whenever you like and you can also share it on social network sites. Needless to say you have to be connected to the internet and at the moment only multiple choice is available.

The tool seems quite easy to use and enables you to download or upload to google the students results. It can be used on many different types of device and you can use quizzes that have been prepared by others and made public.

When making questions there is a limit of 96 characters, from the screenshot that Marijana showed us it seems very intuitive to use. One feature worth mentioning is that you can set a time limit for each question. The only drawback is that you can only create multiple choice questions.

Then we looked at Socrative, Marijana thinks that this is more sophisticated in some ways as it has two settings, student paced and teacher paced. Teacher paced is similar to Kahoot but student paced allows the students to jump around withing the quiz as long as it is completed within a time pre-set by the teacher.

There are several advantages that Socrative has over Kahoot, first of all you can use different types of question - multiple choice (as with Kahoot), True/False, Yes /No and short answer questions too. You can also download your quizzes as a PDF that you can use as a traditional quiz/test. There is also a race that students can play thus adding gamification to the mix.

The first thing to do when you go to Socrative and change the name of your room to something that you can remember. You can either create your quiz online as with Kahoot or you can actually upload quizzes as an excel spreadsheet but apparently care is needed to make sure that the correct answer is chosen. Again preparing a quiz online seems very intuitive. You can add pictures but not video.

Looking at a comparison between the two tools it seems that Socrative has the edge, the only disadvantage that I could see is that it doesn't allow you to add video (yet?). Kahoot seems to be more fun based than study based.

She then allowed the participants to take part in one of the Socrative quizzes that she had created about Lord of the Rings.

This was a very energetic presentation, Marijana is a very enthusiastic presenter and I certainly do intend to have a look at the tools at a later stage. Thank you Marijana.