Five Ways to Use Google Forms in the Classroom

How does one easily and effectively gather data?  This is sometimes a difficult question to find the answer to as teachers.  Luckily, Google Docs, provides the ability to easily and effectively gather data using Google Forms.  Below are a number of ways to use Google Forms to gather data about student learning and create projects.

1.  Use Google Forms as a formative assessment.  Create a survey before a major unit to determine how much students know or don't know.  This could help introduce the unit of study and help guide instruction.

2.  Use Google Forms for quizzes.  This would work best if each student has a Google account through the school, which would require them to sign in as a way to keep track of who is actually completing the form.  The spreadsheet that the form creates nicely displays the responses to the questions for each respondent.

3.  Use Google Forms for student feedback.  After finishing a unit of study, conduct a form that surveys the opinions of the students and what they found helpful or difficult.  This would be an effective way to get students to reflect on their own learning.

4.  Use Google Forms to conduct school surveys on important issues.  Create a form to survey what type of technology students have access to at home.  Use a form to poll the viewpoints of students during a presidential election.  Make a survey that gathers data about bullying within a school.

5.  Use Google Forms for student projects.  Have students make their own form that their classmates must complete.  The students then analyze the data and create a Google Presentation using the results of their survey.  This type of a project could apply to many different content areas.

These are only a few ways to incorporate Google Forms into the classroom.  Google Docs is constantly evolving, which provides new and exciting tools to use in education.  Create a Google Form to better harness data about student learning in the classroom.