Turbo-charged forms

Google forms are great, but they don’t leave you a lot of room for customization. There are some other programs that can help collect a lot of data with highly customizable forms, but they usually cost money. Today, while working on another project, I needed to find a way to make a google form go to a customized page after submitting the form. A little searching turned up this site, which gives a great tutorial on how to customize google forms.

How to style Google forms | Morning Copy via kwout

At first glance, this may seem a bit intimidating, but if you follow the steps, it’s not too bad. The one thing you’ll need to use is an html editor. I like to use nVu, but you could probably do this under the html setting on a blog. It’s mostly a matter of copying and pasting some bits of code. If you don’t know much about CSS (like me), you don’t need to worry – I didn’t change the look of the actual form. I was, however, able to direct users to a new webpage after completing the form.

This might be useful for teachers who want to steer students to a particular sight after they complete a survey. If you used a form to make a quiz, you could have it redirect to website with the answers or a site with more practice. I have a feeling that google will eventually add features to forms that make this much easier, but for now it’s a fairly straightforward solution.

If you’re looking for more, free survey alternatives, try these: Fo.reca.st (very good),  Questions Pro, Stellar Survey, and Polldaddy.  I’ve used all these for some type of survey or poll and all of them perform the same basic functions.  What’s nice about google forms is that it puts all the information into a simple spreadsheet and you can analyze all the data from there.  The other apps do offer more customization (without web hackery) and can be very useful.

End of the year surveys

As the year draws to a close, it’s a great time to do some final assessments of the class and get some perspective on the year. In the past, I always did this with paper – usually a few questions at the end of a test. Unfortunately, I usually looked at the papers once and gave them back to the students or put them in a folder with the intention of analyzing them more when I got the time. The problem was, I never really found the time.

This year, I took a different approach. I’ve decided to do my end of the year surveys on Google forms. The feedback is instantaneous and the analysis is done for me and put into neat graphs automatically via the “summary” feature. The “summary feature” is one that I only discovered after several months of using Google forms. It makes analyzing your results super easy. Here is how to do it:

1. Open the spreadsheet from your survey.
2. Click on “Form” and then click “Show Summary” and you’ll get a nice set of graphs showing your results.

Here are some graphs of the responses  from the survey my 8th graders took.  There were only 11 students in the class and 2 students were gone when we took the survey.  These two questions represent some of the skills I want my students to have when they leave my class.  To get pictures of the graphs, I took a screenshot of them (Command+Shift+4 on a mac lets you take a snapshot of whatever area you highlight).