Google Forms Tips and Tricks

Hello!

As my school has been progressing through the first week of online teaching, I've been getting a lot of questions about Google Forms.

Google Forms

Google Forms is one of my favorite apps included in the G Suite for Education. Before our school building closed, I used Forms in person for everything from exit tickets to surveys to assess how my students were coping with my insistence upon using Google Classroom for everything we did.

Officially, Google defines Google Forms as a program that enables you to "create and analyze surveys right in your mobile or web browser—no special software required." This is true. It's a survey maker. However, if you're a teacher, it's also the best app in the G Suite for Education to use while creating quizzes for students to take.

When I first started using Google Forms, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I knew Google Forms was used to make quizzes, but that was the extent of my knowledge. This blog entry is for anyone who's starting at that level.

Here are two of my favorite tips and tricks for working with Google Forms within Google Classroom that might help to solve some basic issues I've been seeing as people start rolling out Google Forms to their students at my school:

Making Google Forms look cool

Is this step necessary? Absolutely not. Make all the boring Google Forms you want-- we're in a pandemic and no one can judge you on choosing not to be extra when we can't even go outside without dressing like something out of Mad Max.

Wait... We aren't supposed to dress like something out of Mad Max? Ugh, what a boring apocalypse.

Pictured: What I look like on non-Zoom days because I gave up makeup and brushing my hair and have to wear a mask because of the CDC.

Even though you don't HAVE to, I always CHOOSE to make my Google Forms a little extra with a header image and matching color scheme.

Sounds like a lot of work, right? It's not.

99.9% of my header images come from free stock photography websites like Pexels or Unsplash. 

Go to one of those websites, choose a free use image, download it to your computer, and go back to your Google Form. 

Then, click on the little paint palette at the top right of the screen. 

Booooring...

On the right, you'll see a menu pop up. One of the options is to upload a header image. Upload the image you saved from the stock photography website and BOOM-- instantly cooler Google Form. 

Don't come at me about Cats. Loving Cats is a hill I am forever happy to die on. 

Google is so great that it will even adjust the selected background colors to match. 

Like I said, this tip is just about aesthetics, but the next couple of tips are more useful for people who are trying to figure out how to use Google Forms in their Google Classrooms. 

The first question should always be "what is your name?" 

This tip may be more useful for teachers in my school system (or those in any system where student emails are not their names, but their initials and a random string of numbers), but asking for the student's name on the first question has saved me hours of frustratingly sorting through email addresses.

This tip is less important if you 

1. post the assignment as a "quiz assignment" so you can use the "import grades" feature and
2. have an assignment that can be graded automatically (e.g. a multiple-choice assessment where every single question has a right or wrong answer)

However, I teach English. It's very rare for me to give an assessment that is purely multiple-choice without any short answer or essay questions. I almost always have to grade assessments individually. 

Yes, I could still grade individually and just not know which student is which before importing the grades but being able to see which students struggled with a concept as I'm grading is helpful for purposes of collecting data and assessing who I might need to re-teach. 

How to copy a Google Form from another class

My school plans in Content Area Teams (CATs) so our resources are being pooled into collective sample Google Classrooms right now before being shared with each teacher's individual classes. 

If you're working in a similar situation, or simply sharing the same Google Form assessment with multiple classes, it's a smart idea to create a new form for each individual class you're working with. 

Luckily, Google Classroom makes this incredibly simple. Watch the video below for a step-by-step guide on how to copy a form/assignment/literally anything from one class to another.

The key here is to make sure you ALWAYS check "create new copies of all attachments." 

Let's say you don't and you make one form then share it with all four of your American Lit preps (ahem-- I'm talking about something I've done here 😩) and you also forgot to ask them to put their names. You now have over 100 responses on ONE form and NONE OF THEM HAVE NAMES. 

Don't be like I was. It's not a fun position to be in. 

When you create a new copy of the form for the class you're sharing with, their responses will only be available on that specific copy. It's awesome.

I plan to write more about Google Forms (specifically, tips for grading Google Forms), but this post was inspired by the majority of the questions I've gotten about Forms.

I hope it helped!

Until next time,

K. Hanlin