Jon Hoff’s Teaching ICT (PGCE year)

Imagine a paper based survey….we’ve all done them. Imagine wanting to survey your class (or entire school) for feedback on a project. Compose the form, print the form, photocopy the form, give students time to complete the form or let them do it at home, students lose the form, forget the form, the dog eats the form and so on. It’s an exercise that is often for a teacher (or indeed entire school) barely worth the effort. 

Now lets picture the Google Forms alternative. A form is generated and is linked into a spreadsheet which maps the results. Forms can be viewed and completed online and invitations for completion can be sent via email (forms can also be embedded directly into emails or webpages). The resulting spreadsheet containing the data can then also be viewed online, or shared so that others can edit and save the document. 

This idea is all thanks to Tom Barrett’s blog post Using Google Forms in the Classroom. As pointed out by Tom, online forms are nothing new but the simplicity of GF and the way they integrate so smoothly are appealing. A school can send out forms by email to parents (or to students email accounts) or embed the form onto their website. Then just sit back and relax whilst the data tots up in your spreadsheet. Beautiful! 

I want to try my own form and spreadsheet example both for me and you to learn about the possible pitfalls of using this technology. 

 
Please view the spreadsheet which is collecting the data here.

Some fantastic forms and ideas for using GF are available on Tom Barrett’s blog, I’d also like to hear any more or also some other ideas for school wide use when gathering data.

Edit: To get the form to display properly on the page I had to change the “width” tag in Google’s embed code. Don’t know if this is an edublogger thing or what.