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Socrative

Socrative is a software-based audience response system. You create and launch quizzes online, and students use the web browser, or an app, on their own device to answer the questions.

Types of Accounts

There are two types of account in Socrative – free and Pro. There are two main differences:

  • Free accounts only allow 50 students to take a quiz at the same time, so you will want to use a Pro account if you are teaching a larger group than this
  • Pro accounts allow you to link directly into a room, which saves the students having to type in a room name to access a quiz

The MSD have Pro account licenses that you can use for teaching sessions. Please contact us for details. 

Even if you are planning to use the MSD Pro account, we would recommend you register for a personal, free account first. You can then create and test your quizzes in that account, and it is easy to import them into the Pro account later. This is because only one person can be logged in at a time, and if a second person logs in that will log the first person out. This would be bad if it happened during a lecture where someone is using that account. By using your own account to create/test quizzes, you can avoid this issue. 

Creating Quizzes

You can find instructions for creating and editing quizzes at the following links:

Please Note: When using the MSD Pro account, you can access everyone else's quizzes (and they can access yours). Therefore, please be careful not to edit, delete, etc other people’s quizzes.

Importing Quizzes

You can import a quiz from your personal account into the MSD Pro account as follows:

  1. In your account, go to Quizzes and click on the appropriate quiz
  2. In the top right, ensure that sharing is switch on (i.e. “Enable Sharing” toggle is blue)
  3. Copy the "SOC" number under "Enable Sharing", e.g. SOC-12345678
  4. Log out of your personal account and login to the Pro account using the details above
  5. Go to Quizzes, the click “Add Quiz” in the top right and select “Import” from the menu that appears.
  6. Paste the “SOC” number into the box and click import
  7. The quiz should then appear in the list of quizzes 

Launching

When you come to use Socrative in a teaching session, you will need to launch a quiz or question, as follows:

  1. If using a Pro account, you must first select your room using the dropdown menu in the middle of the top bar. You will have been told which room to use by MSDLT, but the names should make it obvious.
  2. Follow these instructions to launch your quiz and monitor the results as students answer questions.

Switching from PowerPoint to Socrative

If you are including questions within a PowerPoint presentation, you will have to switch from PowerPoint to the web browser with Socrative loaded during your presentation. Before you start your lecture/presentation, you should open a web browser and login to Socrative. You can even launch your quiz at this point if it makes sense to do so.

On Windows, you can switch quickly from your presentation to Socrative using Alt + Tab.

Quick Questions

As well as launching a predefined quiz, you can quickly launch an ad-hoc question. You don’t enter the question or options into Socrative, you just ask the question and tell the students the options, or ask them to enter a short answer.

There are more details on quick questions in the Socrative Help. 

Student Access

Students need to login to your room on their device. How they do this varies slightly depending on whether you are using a Free account or a Pro account - it is easier for them if you are using a Pro account.

You may wish to email the students before the teaching sessions, explaining what they need to do in order to be able to access eduroam wireless, to save them using their data allowance to access Socrative. We have put together an email template with the basic details of what students need to do. 

Free account

  1. Go to this URL: m.socrative.com, or scan this QR code:
  2. Enter the Room name

You can include this PowerPoint slide in your presentaiton to show both the URL and QR code during your teaching session.

Pro Account

With a Pro account, each room has a direct URL, so students can just go to the URL, without needing to then enter a room name. There is a bit more preparation work to do, as follows:

  1. Get the direct URL for your room, by going to the "Rooms" tab and clicking the "Share" icon
  2. Convert this into a short, easy-to-type URL, using a URL shortening service such as Bitly
  3. Generate a QR code from the URL, using a QR Code Generator

You can then replace the URL/QR Code in the PowerPoint slide for a free account with your direct ones, and you no longer need to tell the students the room name.

Results and Reports

As well as viewing the live results as students answer the questions (see Launching above), you can also view and download the results of all previous quizzes. Further information on viewing and downloading reports can be found in the Socrative Help.

Useful links and Files

Problems or Queries

If you have any issues or queries, and can't find the answer in the Socrative Help Centre, please feel free to contact MSDLT: msdlt@medsci.ox.ac.uk

For urgent help when running a quiz, call Jon Mason on (01865 2) 72175 or Damion Young on (01865 2) 82756.

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