I used a Google form to gather a piece of work from a year 10 media class this week.  The work was about a website they had been asked to explore and the form prompted their response through questions with a variety of checkboxes, text fields, paragraph fields and one rating grid.

Using the google form meant that all the students were able to simultaneously complete the work without having to download a writing frame or copy out the questions.  I explained to them that I would mail merge their responses to become a piece of written classwork which I could mark, and that as such I expected proper answers rather than just lists of stuf.

I embedded the form within my wiki which I use to deliver all of my lessons so the students were able to access it easily without the need for me sending them the address.

Google Form for prompting written work

As they complete the form and Submit the data is put straight into a spreadsheet in my Google Docs account.  I customised the submit response to remind them to make a note of their homework (which was on the wiki).  The students were then able to work on the plenary task whilst I checked that all the responses had been submitted.

After the lesson I spent a mere 5 minutes downloading the form as a .csv file and creating a mail merge into a word document where I put the titles for each response.  I was able to then print the work as one document ready for marking.  This has so many advantages over getting the students to print work and hand it in including that I had put the name field in the header – something which students invariably forget!

In our school printing is also difficult, the room I was teaching in has no printer but the students can print their work to the LRC.  This is simply not an option in a regular lesson as EACH student then has to go to the LRC and LOG ON to the printer to print their work!  This is 2 floors down from our classroom and getting 30 students to complete a piece of work and print it in a one hour lesson is impossible.  Our usual option is for the students to email the work to me and I can print it.  Of course then I have to download 30 documents, put their names into at least half the headers and print each document.

By using the google form and my mail merge I had literally printed the entire classes’ work within 5 minutes of the end of the lesson.  Definitely one to think about in any lesson where you need to get a piece of work completed and handed in quickly.

Completed work ready to print