The Many Uses of Google Forms

The Many Uses of Google Forms

Before I get started on this week's topic, I wanted to say how great it was to work with so many teachers using the presentation apps that I went over in last week's blog. One of the reasons I took this position was to be able to work with a wider range of students and teachers, and I have seen some outstanding work involving technology usage in all three buildings. Awesome to see!

Now that I have you all warm and bubbly, I thought I should sneak in some techy stuff as well. The inspiration for this week's blog came about after a conversation I had with a first-year 3rd grade teacher in Redgranite (who I might mention has a very handsome oldest brother). She shared with me an 'outside-the-box' way she uses google forms in her classroom.

For those unfamiliar with Google Forms, I will give it to you in a nutshell. You can create a form using various question types and styles. The results can then be sent to a spreadsheet for better organizing or analyzing. Many teachers use google forms in our district for things such as assessments and surveys. Using a google add-on like Flubaroo (see this week's Tech This Out) makes grading a piece of cake. If you want more information on creating a form as a quiz or survey, you can ask me to help. 

Here are two ways to use google forms, that you may not have considered:

Rubrics
When you grade presentations, you might use a paper rubric to make notes on or to score the students work. If you are like me, carrying around a stack of papers (130 or more at the middle school) creates an instant organization issue. I would always get a first hour student's rubric stuck in the second hour pile, or it would take me awhile to enter the scores into the gradebook because the rubrics were not in alphabetic order so I was always using the arrow keys to go all over the gradebook to find a student, wasting valuable time that I could have been using to help my wife with the laundry or dishes instead... . Well, Google Forms can help make this process a whole lot easier. 

First, you can create a form that has all the criteria from your rubric, including a question that gets their name and hour (for easy sorting later). Next, as students present, you can sit in the back with any device (I used my iPad), and score their presentations using the form. The completed forms would then go to a spreadsheet, which could be easily sorted by name and hour for easy grade entry. You can create a formula on the spreadsheet that would tally up the points from each section and give a score or percentage. Using Flubaroo, you could send the graded rubrics out to students through email. Here are a few samples of rubrics using Forms:

Guided Reading, Writer's Workshop 
or Student-Teacher Conferencing
I don't have as much experience with Guided Reading as I do with using rubrics, but to my understanding there is a small group of students of similar ability working with a teacher on a given text. Part of this might include a teacher doing some formative assessment or note-taking on the students' skills. A google form could again streamline this process and allow a teacher to have all their notes organized into a spreadsheet. Here is an example of a form that might be used for this type of activity:

 Additional Resources
There are MANY ways to use google forms in your classroom, and many resources out there on how to use them. One of my favorites is this CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE STORY. Students could easily create their own after learning how to make a google form that uses the response to send readers to different pages. Here are a few more links on how to use google forms in the classroom.
81 interesting ways to use google forms in the classroom
32 ways to use google forms in the classroom

If you need help creating a google form, or analyzing the results of the form, please book a time with me and I would be more than glad to help. As always, thanks for reading and have a great week!


HEY...Tech This Out!

Name: Flubaroo

Type: Google Sheets Add-on

Subject: Any

Grade: Any

What it does: Uses your answers to a google form to grade student submissions. 

My Take: One of the most time consuming parts of teaching is grading work. This add-on can save you tons of time grading fill in the blank, multiple choice, true false, etc. questions. It allows you to grade the short answer/essay style questions, and then completes the scoring for easy grade entering. I have used this add-on tens if not hundreds of times, and I highly recommend it to any teacher that uses google forms. here is a short video I made on how it works:

Link: www.flubaroo.com or go to "Get Add-ons" from the Add-Ons menu in google sheets.