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Earlier this week I had the opportunity to introduce a group of high school teachers to the free Socrative student response system. The response from the teachers was overwhelmingly positive to the point that one math teacher stayed with me for an extra twenty minutes just to brainstorm more ways to use Socrative in her classroom. Socrative is a free service that allows teachers to post questions to students during a class and gather feedback through responses submitted from cell phones, tablets, and laptops. Socrative gives teachers a virtual room in which they gather responses from students. Students sign into a teacher's virtual room by simply visiting the Socrative website and entering the room number distributed by the teacher. There are a variety of ways in which teachers can pose questions to students and gather their responses. The simplest way to pose a question is to simply ask verbally or post it on a whiteboard and then telling students to submit their answers. Teachers can also create quizzes ahead of time, store those quizzes in their Socrative accounts, and then make the quiz go "live" in the virtual room when they want students to take the quiz. Teachers can activate an instant feedback option so that students know when they have answered a question correctly or not. A fun way to use Socrative is to host a team "space race." A space race is a competitive format for quizzes. Space race can be played as a team or individual activity. Each correct answer moves a rocket ship across the screen. The first person or team to get their rocket across the screen wins. I've included below, a video of space race being used in a classroom.

"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) emerged in some measure because of the pressures of national defense during the cold war with the Soviet Union, a broad contest over the ideologies and allegiances of the nonaligned nations of the world in which space exploration emerged as a major area of contest. From the latter 1940s, the Department of Defense pursued research and rocketry and upper atmospheric sciences as a means of assuring American leadership in technology. A major step forward came when President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a plan to orbit a scientific satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) for the period, 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958, a cooperative effort to gather scientific data about the Earth. The Soviet Union quickly followed suit, announcing plans to orbit its own satellite."