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. 

Is it 2008 Yet?

Yes, for those of us who've been waiting, 2008 is finally here -- and it's a totally teachable moment!

With 2nd grade I read the book Duck for President, a cute story which is a good lead-in to discussion about how the best campaigner is not necessarily the best qualified to actually do the job. Here are their thoughts about voting --

Our 5th grade students are learning about the election using a fabulous webquest, Meet the Candidates, designed by Karen Kliegman. We have been researching six major issues of the campaign: Iraq, Homeland Security, environment, economy, education and healthcare. After dividing the class and having them research the issues from both sides, we had presentations and discussion. The discussion was lively and involved. Some of the students are quite impressive in their background knowledge. 

Our next step is to create an online survey to find out which issues are most important to those in our school community. Then we will be learning about political ads, and the kids will be creating their own political ads. We will be posting our work, including results from our survey, student-created political ads and whatever else we do, on our Vote5thGrade Wiki. Check out the webquest for links and great teaching ideas.

Google for Educators is also holding a mock election in which your students can cast their votes. Check out their excellent ideas and resources for teaching about the election.

Finally, I wanted to share this video explaining the electoral college. I have always had a hard time understanding this, and this video, in my opinion, does an excellent job of explaining. 

Electing a US President in Plain English