If we're being honest, grading student work is one of the most tedious and time consuming jobs that a teacher can have. On top of all other expectations and responsibilities, teachers must go through each piece of work and analyze student performance. This gets extra tedious when assessments include a lot of multiple choice questions the teacher must sort through and grade correctly. The room for error grows with every student's work graded! This is where Google Forms comes in. When used in conjunction with Flubaroo, an automatic grading app, Google Forms is the perfect way to formatively assess students for understanding.
For this project, I created a Google Form quiz that is targeted towards 3rd grade students. In my Internship I placement, I am working with 3rd graders that recently completed an ELA lesson on Officer Buckle and Gloria. In order to assess students, my teacher must give a "minor" and "major" assessment throughout the week. I created this Google Form to mimic what my teacher may give her students for a minor assessment after reading through the book, which tests reading comprehension and inferring. Additionally, the quiz aligns with the 3rd grade ELA standard CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.1, which asks students to ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers. My quiz can be found here!
Google Forms is a Google-based program that works in conjunction with Google Drive. It's ann incredibly innovative, program which allows users to create and share forms to collect data, ask questions, and survey groups. The benefit of this program is that it is completely digital and highly customizable. All forms created with Google Forms can be shared with a link, edited online, and retrieved on the go. Additionally, Google Forms allows multiple collaborators to work on a project at once, from all different places. This is a great feature that encourages collaboration and allows groups to work together remotely.
Another benefit to this program is that it saves automatically, just like any of the other programs on Google. As a user, you do not need to be concerned if your computer dies or crashes, as your work will be saved and can be retrieved online and across devices, including iPads, iPhones, and Androids. There is even an app to increase user feasibility!
In order to create a Google Form, log onto Google Drive and pull up Google Forms. Next, select "Blank Form" and begin! Like many Google programs, the forms are completely customizable to fit your needs. A variety of question options are available, including multiple choice, checkboxes, and dropdown options. Students may answer in short answer or paragraph form, and several other elements may be added to accomplish your goal. Additionally, you can make the question required in order to guarantee that all students will answer every question in the quiz.
A small toolbar appears on the right hand side of the page, which displays several options that you may choose to further customize the form. The "+" button allows you to add questions. The "Tt" button gives you the opportunity to create a title and description, which would be helpful if you wanted to separate several different sections throughout the form. The next two buttons, on the toolbar refer to images and videos. This feature makes it easy to embed pictures and videos into the form, if necessary. The last button on the toolbar is one that allows you to create different sections in the form. This feature requires the user to click "Next" in order to move on to the next section. With young children, this may help to increase their focus and keep them on tract. Therefore, I chose to put each question in a separate section in order to keep them from scrolling through and getting confused!
Once you've created all of your questions and customized to your liking, you may also create point values for your questions and determine the correct answers using an "answer key." When students or users complete the form, Google Forms collects the data received in real-time. This means that as people answer your form, the data is immediately populated into an easy-to-read format that allows you to see answers to each question as a group, or individual responses. When users are ready, they may export the data to a Google Sheet, which puts all of the information into a spreadsheet for easy viewing. The spreadsheet for my Google Form can be found below on the first page, named Student Submissions.
If you're a teacher or intend to "grade" submissions, there's a way to do that, also. Flubaroo is a Google Add-On which gives users the ability grade assignments in under a minute! When using this add-on, users must determine the point values of each question and submit a "Answer Key" to allow the program to grade.
