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Google’s Form tool is a treasure trove of educational gold!!
by Jim McDermott

Just immersed myself in Google Forms and am extremely impressed with how much value it brings to the Google Apps suite for educators.  With Google Forms, you have an easy to use data collection tool that can be used for surveying parents, students, and teachers.  The data is dumped directly into a Google Spreadsheet and can be manipulated, graphed, and configured to meet varied needs.  It can even be used to deliver simple online assessments!

Survey tools usually have a monthly subscription fee and a high learning curve as you have to learn a new system (and worse yet, remember a new password).  But the Google Form tool can accomplish 85% of what other online survey tools can at a substantial discount = free!  So principals, you can survey your parents to get their feedback on a new program you’re implementing.  Teachers, you can survey students at the beginning of the year to collect all important information like contact numbers for parents, their areas of interest, the level of computer access they have, and any other information you normally collect to track your students.  Cooler yet, students can use the online form tool to collect research for studies they are doing.  It’s such an easy tool, I can see students using it as a component of a project based unit that surveys their peers who live in the digital world.

As far as using it for assessment, the tool provides a nice summary page indicating the percentage of people who answered in certain ways for multiple choice questions, rating questions, and other choice type questions.  When you get the results on the Spreadsheet side, you can create a copy of the results (to keep the original) and grade the copy.  The graded copy can then have simple formulas added to determine the grade.  You can also sort answers to specific questions so that when you’re teaching it you can group students according to their skill strength. 

When it’s all done, you can hang the test up by printing the spreadsheet document with the scores and comments listed — for those students whose grades you don’t want to display, you can hide their row. 

While this doesn't replace the high powered data tools many school systems are investing in, it doesn provide an easy to use method of assessing your students that is completely yours. In a 1:1 mobile computing school this can realistically replace paper.