Abstract:

Nowadays, most of the students have smart phones and tablets, which can support applications (apps) for mobile devices. Therefore, why not to make a profitable use of them in order to review the concepts covered in class?
The main objective of this research is to study the use of mobile apps as supporting tools in the education context.

Students’ response tools are considered as relevant source to build complementary education material that complement the master classes. Generally speaking, these tools allow building online quiz games, which can be used in the education area to develop questionnaires for reviewing the concepts already covered during the master class.

A set of six tools (alphabetically ordered) are compared and tested in terms of its usability at the University context.

- Infuse learning: Teachers could perform quizzes and prompts questions.
- Students have found different type of answers such as standard multiple choice, true/false and short answer formats. Moreover, students could also reply by creating drawings or diagrams.
- Kahoot: Teachers could opt for online quizzes, surveys and discussions. Moreover, questions could be personalized with pictures and videos. Responses are multiple-choice questions.
- Poll Everywhere: Questions and quiz games to respond through text messages.
- Quiz Socket: Quiz multiple-choice questions could be shown screening them on a whiteboard but also verbally.
- Verso: Not only quiz games could be designed but also post lessons, videos, links, and files.
- Socrative: Very similar to Kahoot application.

A real implementation has been carried out using the Kahoot web tool in a master degree performed at the Universitat Politècnica de València.

Teacher Role in Kahoot:
- Register in the web page https://getkahoot.com/
- Start a questionnaire
- Make questions: the number of characters in order to formulate the question is limited to 79 but images and videos could be uploaded, allowing personalizing as much as possible the questions.
- Prepare short answers.
- Decide the length of time to answer the questions.

Students Role in Kahoot:
- In a personal device (computer, phones, tablets, etc.) students access to their browser and go to kahoo.it
- Students do not need to register in the web page
- Introduce a nick name
- Answer the questions within the time allowed by the teacher

After doing the questionnaire Kahoot app shows the winner person/team. Each student/team has an associated score. The score increases if the question has been properly answered and according to the response rapidity.

Discussion of results:
Teachers do not need to waste time in order to create a personalised application; there exist many open source applications, above compared, in order to apply students’ response tools.
This kind of tools offer relevant benefits such as:
Reviewing the concepts already held in the master class
Students to playing while learning
Students to realise what the most relevant concepts are in the subject
Enhancing teamwork, reach consensus if playing with teams
Students to think in a short period of time as regards the contents covered in the master class
Students to give an idea of the concepts that may appear on the exam
Encouraging students to study in non-school hours in order to improve themselves regarding their colleagues, and promote healthy competitiveness

Keywords:

Experiences in education, technologies in education, applications, mobiles and tablets.