EdTech Spotlight - Conker

EdTech Spotlight posts are shorter entries (as compared to my normal full-sized posts) that highlight a specific educational technology resource.

These normally contain a video clip of me talking about and demonstrating the resource. These video clips are taken from my weekly live streams that I record on Monday nights at 7pm EST. These videos are more casual and conversational than my pre-recorded edited tutorial videos.

For this entry we are taking a look at Conker.

See below for a video clip about this resource, as well as a brief explanation and relevant links. If you use this resource, I would love to hear about your experience!

Supercharge Google Forms with Add-ons

Google Forms is already a very powerful, full-featured program that allows you to create forms, surveys, polls, quizzes, and more. 

However even with all its options, there may still be some features missing from the Forms that you would like.

Thankfully Google allows people to create Add-Ons that can be easily installed, which add new features and tools to Google Forms.

Over time the amount of available Add-ons has grown tremendously. So how do you wade through all of these to find the best ones and the hidden gems? 

To help out I have collected a list of my favorite Add-ons for Forms. Certainly this is not a comprehensive list, and there are other awesome Add-ons beyond my list, but these will give you a good place to start. Some of these Add-ons will likely be familiar to you, but hopefully you will find a few new ones or be encouraged to dig deeper into one you have tried before.

See below for my list of recommended Forms Add-ons, what they do, ideas for how they can be used in schools, and a quick overview of how to install, use, and remove Add-ons. And be sure to let me know which Add-ons you would recommend to add to the list. I would love to learn from you!

Formatting Text in Google Forms

Recently Google announced some updates that will give you more control over the fonts and formatting in Google Forms. This can:

• make it easier for your students to read the text in the Form,
• or allow you to create more advanced questions,
• or simply jazz up the look of your form.

In this post we are going to look at three options.

• First, how to change the font for different parts of your Form.
• Second, how to format the text in the title, description, and questions.
• And third, how to format the text in the answers.

See below for a 6 minute tutorial video and detailed directions on how this works.

40 Google for Education Updates for Summer 2021

Summer is a nice time to take a break and relax, but Google has instead been busy working on new updates and features for schools. 

On June 22nd Google hosted their "Anywhere School 2021" event (http://goo.gle/tas21) where they covered loads of announcements concerning 40 updates for Google Classroom, Google Meet, Chrome and Chromebooks, and Google Workspace tools in general.

In case you missed it, or are just trying to review through everything that was shared, see below for a list of all 40 updates that were shared at the event.

How to Create Self-Grading Quizzes in Google Classroom

Google Forms is a fantastic tools for making self-grading assessment for students. Google Classroom is a wonderful way to assign and collect work from students.

Wouldn't it be great to put these two great tools together?

Well, just like the peanut butter and chocolate in a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, Google Forms and Google Classroom work together perfectly to make it easier than ever to create, distribute, and grade assessments in schools.

When you create a quiz through Classroom, many of the needed settings in Google Forms are automatically taken care of for you, there's no need to worry about copying the correct link for the quiz, and the student grades are easily imported right into your Classroom grade book!

See below for a quick 8-minute video that will show you everything you need to know for creating quizzes in Classroom. Then if you want to dig even deeper, I have also included a 1-hour video from a webinar I did a while back that goes into more advanced options and uses of Forms for assessments.

24 Tips for Google Forms Quizzes

Google Forms has come along way over the last few years! First it received a major face lift from "Old Forms" to "New Forms", and then it got the Quiz feature to auto-grade online assessments, and now Google continues to add new options and features each month.

So much has changed over the last few years, I thought it was time to make a new version of my webinar on "Google Forms for Online Assessments". In my new training I cover (at least) 24 tips and tricks for getting the most out of the new features in Google Forms for when you make online quizzes for your students. These include questions with multiple right answers, open-ended questions, extra credit, assistive tech tools for students taking the quiz, importing scores into Classroom, and much more.

See below for a full list of the 24 tips that get covered in the webinar. You will also find the recorded video from the training which you can watch to see each and every one of these tips demonstrated for you. Even if you have been using Forms for a while, I hope you learn something new!

Multiple Correct Answers in Google Form Quizzes

One of the most popular uses for Google Forms is creating online assessments for students. It is a quick, easy, and powerful way to create auto-grading quizzes. As with all Google tools, new features are continually being added, making Forms even more versatile for assessment.

Recently I came across an update for Forms (at least it was new to me) that allows teachers to create "Short Answer" questions which can support more than one correct answer. In the past you needed to use an additional tool, such as the Flubaroo add-on for Sheets, to be able to accept more than one right answer, but now you can do that with Google Form's built-in quiz feature.

See below for directions on how this works, and how you may want to take advantage of this neat option.

Make Sequencing Questions with Google Forms

Google Forms is a great tool for assessments, and it provides a wide range of question types, including multiple choice, checkboxes, short answer, and more.

However, it is becoming common for our students to see high-stakes online assessments with more advanced question types, such as drag and drop, hotspots, and ordering items. Unfortunately Google Forms does not support these more interactive types of questions yet.

However, if we get creative with some of the features in Google Forms, there is a way to do ordering or sequencing type problems. These types of questions have students put randomized items in the proper order, such as dates of historical events, stages in a science process, parts of a story, and more.

In this blog post we will take a look at how to create a randomized sequencing question using just Google Forms with written directions and a short tutorial video. We will also try out several examples to see what the end result would look like.

Grading Extended Response Questions with Google Forms Quiz Feature

For many years Google Forms has been a great tool for creating online assessments. This process became even easier when Google added the new Quiz feature to Forms, allowing the quiz to be auto-graded without the need for a third-party tool such as the Flubaroo add-on. Although the new Quiz feature was very easy to use, it did lack some of the more advanced options and flexibility provided by Flubaroo. For a detailed comparison of Flubaroo versus the Forms Quiz feature see this earlier blog post: New Google Forms Quiz Feature vs Flubaroo

Recently though Google has added some new options to the built-in Quiz feature, making it more powerful and beginning to close the gap with Flubaroo. One of the new options is the ability to hand-grade extended response questions. This is very helpful as it allows teachers to build assessments with higher-level questions that move beyond multiple choice. Open-ended, essay-type questions can provide a better picture of student understanding, assess higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, and reduce the potential for cheating on assessments.

See below for detailed directions on how to create and grade extended response questions using the built-in Quiz features in Google Forms.

Engaging Quiet Students with Google Forms

When I was a student (many, many years ago) I dreaded class participation. Now don’t get me wrong… I loved school. I was a straight-A student who excelled in all my subjects, loved to learn, and took the most challenging courses.

I just didn’t like to talk.

You see, from the time I was a little child into my early teen years, I used to have a stutter. Some days were better than others, but one thing that always brought out the stutter was speaking out loud in class. When a teacher asked a question, I most always knew the answer, but was hesitant to raise my hand. And nothing was worse than the teacher having each student in class take turns reading from the chapter in the textbook. The closer it got to me, the more nervous I became, trying to determine which paragraph would fall on me and which words I would undoubtedly stumble over.

And I am sure I was not alone. For a wide variety of reasons, student may be reluctant to speak up and participate in class:

• Perhaps they wrestle with a speech impediment.
• Maybe they fear they do not have the right answer or a valuable contribution.
• Or they just need more time to think before they are ready to answer.
• Or maybe they are shy.

Thankfully today technology provides us with more tools for students to participate in class, share their ideas, and ask questions. One great option is to use Google Forms. See the rest of this blog post below for some ideas on how Forms can not only involve the quiet kids, but improve class engagement for everyone.

New Google Forms Quiz Feature vs Flubaroo

Google Forms has long been a favorite tool for schools, and one of the most popular uses for Forms has always been online assessments. Digital quizzes have many benefits for schools including:

• Automatic grading for quick feedback for teachers and students.
• Easy analysis of the results to determine who needs help and what content needs retaught.
• Use of assistive technology to have text read aloud or zoomed in for easier reading.
• Preparation for high-stakes online tests.
• Savings on paper and printing.
• Easy to update in the future or share with others for collaborative editing.

Google Forms has always made it super easy to create quizzes, send them out to students, and collect all the responses. The only pain point has been how to grade the student submissions.

Thankfully for years we have have the awesome add-on for Google Sheets called Flubaroo. This add-on allows educators to automatically grade the quiz responses as they get submitted from a Google Forms and collected in a Google Sheet. Over time more and more valuable features have been added to Flubaroo to make it a powerful tool for online assessment.

Suddenly though, there is a new option. At ISTE 2016 Google announced that Forms will now natively support the grading of online assessments without the need of an add-on such as Flubaroo. What does this mean for all the schools who have been using Flubaroo for years? Does it still have a place? Do these new features make it obsolete?

For all the details, see the rest of the blog post below for an in depth comparison of what Forms does, what Flubaroo does, and where they are different. Spoiler alert: Don't throw out Flubaroo just yet. Also, I cover a detailed overview of how to use the new Google Forms Quiz feature.

Make Google Form responses easy to read with “Save as Doc” add-on

Google Forms is a one of the most useful parts of the Google Apps suite for schools. With Google Forms teachers, techies, admins, and students can accomplish many tasks including:

• Online assessments
• Collecting data for science experiments
• Brainstorming ideas in class
• Completing a reading log
• Surveying parents
• Accepting technology help tickets
• And much more…

For all its wonderful features, one pain point for Google Forms is viewing all the responses in an easy-to-read format. When the responses from a Google Form get collected in a Google Sheet, the responses are arranged one per row, with each answer in its own cell. This is ok for short answers, but can be quite a challenge to read when the answers are long (essays, open ended questions, etc.). Reading lots of text from multiple questions from a bunch of respondents is just not easy to do in a Google Sheet.

Now the new version of Google Forms does let you view each response one at a time, which is a definite step forward (click “Responses” then click “Individual”) but it is still not an easy way to view all the responses at once in an easy to read format.

One of the best solutions to this problem is an add-on for Sheets called “Save as Doc”. See below for detailed directions on how to use “Save as Doc” to take responses from a Google Form and put them in a readable format as a Google Doc.

Supercharge Google Forms with Add-ons

Google Forms is already a very powerful, full-featured program that allows you to create forms, surveys, polls, quizzes, and more. 

However even with all its options, there may still be some features missing from the Forms that you would like.

Thankfully Google allows people to create Add-Ons that can be easily installed, which add new features and tools to Google Forms.

Over time the amount of available Add-ons has grown tremendously. So how do you wade through all of these to find the best ones and the hidden gems? 

To help out I have collected a list of my favorite Add-ons for Forms. Certainly this is not a comprehensive list, and there are other awesome Add-ons beyond my list, but these will give you a good place to start. Some of these Add-ons will likely be familiar to you, but hopefully you will find a few new ones or be encouraged to dig deeper into one you have tried before.

See below for my list of recommended Forms Add-ons, what they do, ideas for how they can be used in schools, and a quick overview of how to install, use, and remove Add-ons. And be sure to let me know which Add-ons you would recommend to add to the list. I would love to learn from you!

The Ultimate Guide to Creating Assessments with Google Forms

Google Forms is an easy but powerful tool for teachers to create online assessments for their students. And with the help of the Flubaroo add-on, the quizzes can be graded automatically as well. There are many benefits for using online assessments with students:

• Quicker feedback - With autograding quizzes, students can get their results in a matter of minutes, rather than having to wait until the next day (at the soonest) to see if they understand the material or need more help.
• More frequent assessments - Since the quizzes can be graded electronically, teachers can easily give small assessments each day or so, giving teachers much more frequent feedback on how their students are doing, and if they need to adjust their instruction.
• Statistics - Since the assessments are digital, so are the results, which makes it much easier to do item analysis, look for patterns, and determine where the needs are.
• Preparation - Most states are moving to online assessments for their high stakes grade level tests for students, such as PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and AIR. It is important that students feel comfortable taking tests online so the state tests will assess their content knowledge, not their technology skills (or lack thereof). Using online assessments in your class will help prepare students for the state tests.
• Collaboration - With digital assessments it is easy for teacher to collaborate with their colleagues when writing the quizzes, or to share assessments with other staff for their use.
• Special Needs - By going digital we are also able to take advantage of assistive technology. For example, with online assessments students can zoom in as needed, and use text to speech to read the questions.
• Multimedia - Online assessments don’t just have to be digital versions of the same old paper and pencil tests. Instead we can incorporate color images and videos to provide a richer experience.
• Savings - And of course going paperless can help save on paper, ink, and budgets.

And there are probably many more benefits as well. The next question then is … how to you create, distribute, and grade online assessments?

See below for a large collections of resources I have created to give you everything you need from getting started to advanced techniques. You will find two videos, each an hour long, as well as several help guides and slideshows.

2016 Google Predictions

Over the course of 2015 we saw hundreds of updates roll out for users of Google products and services, giving us new tools and features to improve teaching and learning in our schools.

With 2016 just a few days away it is now time to predict what changes we hope to see in the new year. Below are my eight predictions for Google in 2016.

(Note: You can also see the video of these predictions in the recorded session of our December Google User Meeting here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku8-RnWIJ9E You can skip ahead to the 1 hour 22 minute mark to jump straight to the predictions section.)