Using Socrative in the classroom

I'm a big fan of Socrative. The classes I teach are usually fairly small (~20 students), but occasionally, I've had larger (~30 students) classes (I know the bio people are probably in hysterics over my calling 30 students a "large" class). When I have more students in the classroom, it's a bit trickier to get a quick feel of how well they're understanding the material, and it's also harder to make sure everyone is engaged in the lesson. To help remedy this, I started using Socrative in my larger classes (and occasionally in smaller classes where a tech survey reveals that all or nearly all of my students have some sort of device they could bring to class). My students seem to really like it: post-use surveys revealed comments indicating that students liked the anonymity and felt more comfortable taking risks when answering questions because they weren't as afraid of getting the wrong answer, and it was really helpful to be able to see in real time what they were and weren't understanding. Additionally, it makes it easy to turn any discussion into a task-based activity: I'd put students in pairs or small groups and tell them that they could only submit one answer per group, so they had to reach a consensus before submitting their answer. It's also really easy to use on my end and is dead simple on the students' end: they're able to use it easily from the first time, so I don't have to spend a lot of time "training" them how to submit answers.

Check out their website and click "watch demo" for a quick overview; alternatively, here's a detailed tutorial for those who are interested in learning more about how Socrative works.