Google Forms and Self-grading Quizzes

Just when you thought that it could not get any better, Google does it again. This time it is with Forms. Since my school has jumped into the world of Google Apps, we have been slowly figuring out ways to maximize productivity and are constantly finding ways to save teacher's time while making the students educational experience better.

One problem we have had is timely feedback. Teachers at my school (and around the world) have difficulty with providing feedback to students. The old way was to sit down and grade papers, making notes providing suggestions and handing that back for students and parents to view. We have found a better way with Google Forms.

Google Forms allows the user to gather information. The information can be anything for example we post a quarterly parent survey during parent teacher conference. We prepare a Google Form that collects the info and share the link to parents and community members through our official middle school Facebook Fan Page. The parents answer the questions on the form and boom! the results are all nicely collected in a spreadsheet in my Google Drive.

Now to the feedback problem. What a student knows is another form of information that can be collected from a Form. Create a quiz, test, or a simple ticket out question in a Google Form. It can be as informal as students taking out their phones and going to the link to answer the form. On the other hand create a full blown test. The beauty of this lies in where the information goes. All information collected from a Form may go to a Google Spreadsheet in the creator of the Form Google Drive. The information collected can be sorted by any of the methods a spreadsheet can do. For example sort by name to list the answers to the form alphabetically to match a grade book. The information is ready to grade. But wait... how do you get it to grade itself?

Flubaroo.

http://youtu.be/QJ60szcUbBE


Flubaroo is a small piece of software that can be installed in the accompanying spreadsheet (where the info goes) to automatically grade the quiz.

Install Flubaroo by clicking on Insert then Script

This will open the script gallery and search for Flubaroo. Once it is installed Flubaroo will appear as a menu option in the toolbar. Click on Flubaroo to set the key to the quiz. Watch the video above for more detail.

Feedback:
The feedback that students get is really helpful for the classroom setting. The teacher may set triggers to alert him or her of a question that was missed by a certain number of students.

My favorite part is the option to email the results directly to students. After the quiz is graded students may receive an email detailing their answers and what they missed. Very cool.

To see this in action join my Google Hangout on the subject of Google Forms and Self-grading Quizzes March 5th at 4pm Central. There you will find me and my edtech friends discussing and sharing about Google Apps.

For a more in depth look into Google Forms read my book Google Apps Meets Common Core due out April 23!