Earlier this week, I posted about my love for Google Apps for Education (GAFE, for short) and I shared how I utilize Google Sheets to collect and analyze data.  You can go back and read all about that here, but today I’m going to talk to you about another of my favorites: Google Forms.

Whether you feel comfortable with Google Docs and Sheets or not, you can use Google Forms to create a super simple assessment that will export data into Google Sheets.  Newsflash:  It’s not that complicated.

I use Google Forms to create exit tickets, surveys, and short assessments for my students.  They are very quick, easy to use, and, because they export directly into a spreadsheet, they give me lots of tangible data to analyze for next steps.

Here are just a few of the ways to use Google forms in the classroom:

1.  Exit tickets – Sometimes I’ll ask students to share 1 or 2 things they learned during today’s lesson using a generic form like this one.  Other times, the questions are more lesson-specific, like this exit slip for third grade math.  You can even turn on the “quiz” feature and Google will grade them for you! (Hello, extra free time!)

2.  Surveys – You can use Google Forms to administer informal reading inventories and pre-assessments to determine student interest or level of prior knowledge.  For instance, last school year, my class participated in the #GratitudeExperiment and they had to fill out a pre- and post-survey.  Totally did them on Google Forms to save time and money!  You can check out the pre-survey here.

3.  Student conferences – As you walk around the room and conference with students during reading, writing, or math workshop, record your conversations and notes in Google Forms.  You can email this directly to the student so they will have it or print for your own notes.  It will be super easy to go back and look at previous conference notes and organize that data for parent teacher conferences!  Here’s an example of an independent reading conference you might use in your classroom.

4.  Rubrics – You can create rubrics in Forms and use them to streamline the grading process.  I haven’t actually done this one yet, but I can’t wait to try it out this school year.  Have you used it before?  Let me know what you did!

My absolute favorite part of Google forms has to be the data you get from it!  To start, it provides you with a spreadsheet you can export, like this one I got from my #GratitudeExperiment survey.  From here, you can organize and analyze as needed.  Check out my last blog post about using Google Sheets to manage classroom data.

And as if it Forms wasn’t amazing enough, it also summarizes the data for you, giving you beautiful little charts like this one so you can see results at a glance! If this isn’t Google’s way of saying, “I love you, teachers,” I don’t know what is.

Have you used Google Forms in the classroom before?  There are a million ways to use it and I can’t wait to learn more from you!  Head on over to forms.google.com and be creative – then share what you’ve done!