Abstract:

In recent years, new tools have emerged in the context of information and communication technologies that promote active participation, teacher-student interaction and continuous follow-up of students. One of the most widespread methodologies is the "Classroom Response Systems (CRS)", whose most widespread version is the so-called Clickers. In these systems, students use devices that allow the selection of an answer to a question made by the teacher. The system incorporates a software that collects the information from the questionnaires and summarizes the results. These tools allow the teacher to stimulate participation and motivation of students, break the classroom routine, improve attention and contribute to the resolution of doubts, serving as a complement to traditional teaching systems such as lectures. They also allow improving the monitoring of the evolution of the students, since they offer real-time statistics of the results of the answers. One of the main disadvantages of these devices is their high cost, which complicates their acquisition, especially when they should be applied to a high number of students.

In the last years different alternatives to these commercial systems have appeared in the web that offer the advantage to be free, offering similar or even better services than Clickers. These are applications that can be installed on mobile phones, tablets or computers with iOS, Android or Windows Phone operating systems. These initiatives are part of the growing tendency of the use of the electronic devices in learning. One of best rated tools has been the free application Socrative, which is easily accessible to the teacher and students both via the web and through downloading and installation on the electronic device. The present work aims to put in place, apply and evaluate the use of this tool during the teaching of two disciplines within two undergraduate degrees offered by the Technical University of Madrid: Forest Engineering and Natural Environment Engineering. It is intended, ultimately, to stimulate the active participation and the sustained training of students.

After implementing this academic tool, the degree of overall satisfaction of students was monitored by means of a survey configured on a Likert scale of 5 levels. Most of the students (66.7%) considered the experience as positive (level 4 of satisfaction), and the 16.7% of them as very positive (level 5). The 83% of the students indicated that the use of Socrative contributed to improve the learning process (level 4 or 5) and a similar percentage of students answered that the use of Socrative stimulated their active participation during the classes. The overall experience of the implementation of this technology during the learning process from both, the teacher and the student point of view can be regarded as positive.

Keywords:

Information and communication technology, ICT, Socrative, clickers, active learning.