Google Forms Rocks!

Okay, so this is a bit belated. My school work took a bit of a back seat last week as I was helping my sister get ready for her wedding this past weekend. As she heads off to "relax" on her honeymoon, I'm trying to play catch-up.......

Last week I set up a trial run using google forms (an application option in google docs). I created a few questions and inserted them into my blog. I asked classmates to take my assessment to see how this tool might be incorporated into my future classes.

I will start by saying simply: Google forms Rocks! It is very user friendly and I can see it being incorporated into so many different aspects of my class.

Here's how it works: You create a set of questions (see my blog post below) and then all the answers to those questions are sent directly to your google docs account and tracked in a spreadsheet. Each set of answers is time stamped so you can see exactly when it was sent. You can then at any point go in and view results. You can also look at a summary of all of the results. The only glitch I had initially was I wasn't sure how to keep track of who was sending in the results. The first two sets of answers came through, but there was no way to see who sent them. How you fix this is to simply make question number one of the form say "what is your name". I made a quick Jing video to give people a more in depth look at how this tool works.

Here are just a few ways I see myself using this tool next year:

1. As a "check in" after a reading/video viewing assignment. It's a great paper-free way to make sure that everyone is doing their homework.
2. This would be an awesome way to collect lab results. Because results are collected in an excel spreadsheet form. I could easily take all of the results and run any necessary statistics.
3. Collect discussion questions. Sometimes students have great thoughts that for whatever reason they do not want to share with the class as a whole. A discussion via blog commenting would publicize everyone's thoughts. A form would send their thoughts right to me...
4. Class feedback/evaluation. A great way to see how people like the class and find out what's working/what's not.
5. Self evaluation. You could create a rubric and get student input on have them grade themselves. I feel that this is always a great way to have students truly understand assessment expectations.

Anyone else have any thoughts? I think as most of us are creating class blogs, this will be a very useful tool!