We had such a great group session in February. I love it when – in spite of the session plan – people make it really clear that they’re interested in something different.
From the teacher survey I’d sent around, it seemed that people were most interested in digital storytelling and recording student voices.
So we started the session by looking at this teacher survey, a combination of online form and spreadsheet containing the results. And boom! People were suddenly interested in the possible classroom application of this kind of software.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it
Create a learning activity for your students, involving some kind of online survey.
- Demand as much support as you need,
- and be ready to tell your colleagues what happened.
Ideas for teaching and learning
- Give students a way to respond on-screen – to video, image or written.
- Receive student responses in a spreadsheet, so you have an overview of the group.
- Find out more about what your students want to learn in class, or what they need to do in their lives.
- Get students to create their own survey for literacy or numeracy learning.
Please add your own ideas in the comments below…
What are the issues?
- What’s the best way of asking a question – to get the response you need?
- How will you give students the survey?
- Do students need to login to fill the form?
Help files – how to work google forms
Examples in practice
Other resources
- Take a look at Tom Barrett’s “Interesting Ways to use Google Forms in the Classroom” (one of a huge series of crowd-sourced documents from Tom and his worldwide network of colleagues).
- Plus look at this one: Tom has also created a bunch of forms you can copy and re-use. What a guy!
Here’s Tom’s crowd-sourced set of ideas:
Credits: Photo by Johnson Cameraface (creative commons at flickr): http://flic.kr/p/d2Ew6m
We did one or two Google forms quite successfully a couple of years ago, Michael. But you need to really do it in the computer room with everyone together for support and possibly complete it on hard copy first so that students are familiar with the language and know how they want to respond. I'll see if I can find it and put the link here. They found it very easy to navigate. I wonder if they could work with the spreadsheet too?
Here's the form: http://bit.ly/1hhtQuA. (Let me know if that link doesn't work.)
I can't really share their responses for privacy reasons but I actually summarised the results in a report to management – maybe I can find that too, soon;-)
Hi Jill, thanks so much for your response.
These are great tips for other teachers. It's true, this is the kind of activity you want to provide maximum support to learners. And you probably wouldn't ask people to create their own until they'd filled out a few already.
Great questionnaire too… shame we can't make your link live. Maybe we can.
Link to Jill's classroom survey.