Uses for Google Forms

In her post, Getting Started With Google Forms, Catlin Tucker shares some interesting uses for forms in the classroom and asks for examples of other creative uses of Google Forms. Here are a few of mine.

Job Application: My 4th/5th grade students may apply for classroom jobs and, once "hired" they keep their jobs for approximately one month after which time they can apply for a new job or reapply for the same job. Jobs are optional.

Choosing our read-aloud book: I narrow down a list of possibilities to about 5 choices. When I share the form, I also share the links to the reviews of each book on Amazon. Everyone can vote privately for the book they really want without any peer pressure.

Daily 3 timesheet for accountability and self-monitoring:
I also tried using Google Forms to make a timesheet for students to record their Daily 3 choices. Since we rarely have time to do all three every day, I wanted them to make sure that they are choosing each activity over a week. I also wanted to have a way to see what they are doing, so I had them make a place on the form to record what they actually did during the time.

I demonstrated how to make the form, then had them make their own which they were supposed to share with me. It was a total failure for many reasons.

Because the Google form was such a pain and really didn't work, I decided to use an "old-school" paper graph with my other class. In some ways that one worked better, but overall I think the whole D3 accountability thing is not really working.