Sunday, January 25, 2015

Using Google Forms and Sheets

If you've ever used Estimation 180, you'll notice there's a Google Form on each day where anyone in the world can input their estimate. Although it's not what I envisioned when initially designing the site, it has served a purpose. And it's free. So until I have a million dollars or someone is willing to donate a bunch of money to Estimation 180 so there can be a classroom type interface like teacher.desmos.com or Pear Deck, the Google forms will have to do for now.

My suggestion: create your own form so that you can capture rich data from your students. I believe it's so important that we capture, sort, assess, and discuss student thinking. I put together three short screencasts on:
  1. Suggestions for using your own Google Form with students.
  2. How to make the Google Form in video 1.
  3. How to sort and use the data in the Google Sheet. 

Part 1: The finished form
  • Form fields and parameters
  • Daily pic in the form


Part 2: Creating and setting up the form
  • Text fields and advanced settings
  • Insert the image URL into the form
  • Creating sentence starters
  • Using a shortened URL


Part 3: Sorting the data in a Google Sheet
  • Using Add-ons, specifically rowCall to separate class periods into their own sheets
  • Conditional Formatting
  • Finding the average (and more) of a column


Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions to make the work flow more efficient.

If you're headed to CUE 2015 in Palm Springs, come check out one of my two sessions where I'll use Google Forms and Sheets to capture, sort, assess, and discuss the rich thinking and data you can receive from students.

Forms,
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9 comments:

  1. This is really useful. It's great to find out in three minutes the essence of the tool and the learning curve for using it...

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    Replies
    1. Right on. Glad to hear it's useful. Let me know if you have any suggestions or questions.

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  2. I don't have access to computers daily, but you've got me thinking...I do have Nspire's with Navigator. Right now, students come up with their estimates individually and then I ask 2 kids each (ish) for their too high, too low, how they made their estimate, level of confidence and estimate. But I could gather all the numbers and we could discuss the whole class instead (which would be more interesting and also less, "why is Juan's 100 not the best choice for too low here?"). You've totally inspired me.

    We do Estimation 180 every day with my below level freshmen and they LOVE it. They get mad at you sometimes, but I think its helping them develop their number sense so much.

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    1. Hi Mary,

      Glad to hear your students have a love/hate relationship with Estimation 180. That made me chuckle. Hope your new direction goes well. Thanks for checking in.

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  3. Hi Andrew,
    I'd agree that capturing student thinking in an easy, organized way is key to using the data with purpose.

    I've been using a Google Form to allow students to submit links to their work and align it with a learning goal, as well as self assess themselves. It isn't perfect, but it is getting better over time.

    If interested, here's how the system works:
    https://tapintoteenminds.com/digital-assessment-workflow-google-drive-sheets/

    Thanks for sharing your ideas.

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    Replies
    1. Hi Kyle,

      Thanks for sharing. Looks like a lot of thought has gone into your organization. I'm checking out DocHub right now.

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  4. Thanks for the heads up on the add-ons. I wish I knew about save as doc when I had my students write a reflection after taking a google forms end of year test. It was quite annoying scrolling left and right keeping track of what row I was reading. I will also be using rowcall when applicable. Thanks.

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  5. could you fix the post so that all the part videos or animations or images show? They aren't popping up for me.

    Thanks for all the work!

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    1. Hi Shaun,

      Sorry the videos might not be working. Try this link:
      http://bit.ly/1QtXIQp

      Delete