Tools: Google Forms

What is Google Forms?

With Google Forms you can plan events, make a survey or poll, give students a quiz, or collect other information in an easy and efficient way. Google forms can simply be described as free, collaborative survey software. It records all responses in Google Spreadsheets which is just one subset of the Google Docs applications and can be downloaded as a Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice file for further manipulation. You can create a form from Google Drive or from an existing spreadsheet that can record the responses to your form.

To create a survey, quiz, or type of form, all you need is a Google account. You can then login or obtain an account at the web address of docs.google.com and create a form following these steps:

• Go to Drive at drive.google.com

• In the top left, click New, hover over More, and choose Google Forms.

• A new form will automatically open.

In the form template, you can add any questions you want. You can also organize your form by adding headers and dividing your form into several pages. Learn more about editing your form

Where does Google Forms fit in an educational context?

You can create unlimited number of quizzes and surveys using Google Docs for free and virtually unlimited number of students can participate in such quizzes/polls via the web browser.

The forms created with Google Docs are hosted on google drive which is a free cloud service. This enables students to access the form anywhere and anytime via any web browser. The forms are also mobile friendly so students can take advantage of the fast and reliable cloud service and responsive forms to send their responses via a mobile phone browser as well.

All the votes and responses are automatically collected in an Excel spreadsheet. This makes it easier for teachers to analyze large sets of data using charts and other complex spreadsheet functions.

Google Forms support a wide range of question types including scale and grid that are generally not available in other web polling services (at least the free ones). Teachers can also chose to get email notifications as soon as students fill in a Google Docs form with their responses.

Google Forms can automatically record the email addresses of students who fill out the form but it is also a great tool for surveys as it also allows users to remain anonymous if they chose to.

One of the most powerful features of Google Forms is that it supports conditional or “logic branching”. This allows the teachers to serve a different set of questions to students based on their previous response.

Finally, Google Forms supports various functions like ImportXML, ImportHTML, etc. so teachers who know programing can do more complex processing with the submitted data. Google Forms also supports Google Scripts which enable apps to use the script and API to take advantage of all these features and combine them with other google apps to create a powerful and complex educational tool.

Things to consider:

Forms are not automatically graded. Teachers need to manually grade each question, or create a formulas to allow to have these forms graded in minutes, or use scripts such as Flubaroo and other plugins to be able to automatically grade the quizzes.

There is no time limit on each question of the quiz in Google Forms, so students can go through the questions on their own pace. This allows them to answer the questions in the order they like - skip some questions and go back to them later.

Furthermore, students have to be online to participate in the quiz. This also means that some students might be able to search for the answers online.