Create the space for dialogue
The Interesting Ways series of resources continue to grow as the community add ideas from the classroom. Below is one of the most popular with over 70 ideas shared by teachers for using Google Forms in a range of different ways.
Make sure that you explore nearly 40 other crowdsourced resource like the one above – you can see the full series of resources on the Interesting Ways page
Since March I have been running this little survey that is a limited comparison between the current preferences between Apple iPads in the classroom or Android Tablets. It obviously doesn’t take into account the other platforms that are on offer such as Windows machines.
There has been a fantastic response with over 1000 responses submitted and counting!
From conversation with colleagues on Twitter it seems that many people are heading towards Apple products due to the maturity of the App store and the sheer range of Apps that is available.
It would seem from these results that most educators are opting for the iPads over tablets running Android operating systems.
If you took a moment to vote I am really grateful – it would also beneficial to all who are interested in investing in iPads for you to leave a comment explaining your current thinking about the two types of devices. Explaining the thinking behind your decision process could really help others in the same situation.
When you share your classroom experiences and ideas, one thing you hope for is that they are transferable to other classrooms. This week I was delighted to see three examples of my ideas being successfully applied elsewhere.
The first is from Peter Richardson a primary school teacher in Preston who took my idea for using Voicethread for peer assessment of writing and used it for work in their Egyptian work. Here is the Voicethread he shared.
Kevin McLaughlin is a Year 4 teacher in Leicester and after reading my blog post about using Twitter and Google Forms for a data handling lesson, has applied the same ideas himself. His class compared music tastes from Kevin’s Twitter network (via a Google Form) with their own. I am pleased it worked well for his Year 4 class too, as Kevin explains,
The data that we now have will be used next week in further Maths lessons and the children added that they will continue to use the survey over the weekend at home and with friends. Real data from real people. This is what makes this type of investigation so very useful and brings an added dimension to data collection activities.
The final ripple I caused comes from Jan Webb another Year 4 teacher in Cheshire. Jan took up the challenge of using my Maths Maps idea with her class and developed a series of activities in a Google Map of Berlin for her class to use.
View Berlin in a larger map
Jan explains on her blog how they enjoyed using the resource in her class.
…a great deal of discussion arose from finding the shapes in some of the buildings and finding how many rectangles we could see in a building! We all really enjoyed these tasks and they not only let us discuss aspects of shape, but also provoked discussions about aspects of life in Germany.
These ripples are very encouraging as you are able to clearly see the effect sharing your own practice has on other teachers and subsequently other children’s learning.
If you have always thought about starting a blog but never got round to it, why not give it a go. The more pebbles in the pond causing ripples the better.
Over the next two weeks in our year 5 class we will be exploring data investigation and the tools with which we can use to undertake them. The first three days of this week we will be looking at some technology that can enhance data handling and make our life easier. In today’s session we learned about Google Forms and I demonstrated how they work with the help of my Twitter network.
We wanted to achieve three things from our maths session today
After placing the lesson in the context you see in the first paragraph, I began the session by explaining that I was going to use my Twitter network to help demonstrate how we can use Google Forms to collect data.
I spent some time with the class going through the process of creating a Form from the Google Docs home screen and then adding my questions and running through the different types of questions you can use. We talked a lot about how this type of data collection is only good for some occasions and a pencil and paper method can still be the best way. It is a matter of choosing the most appropriate.
The class would be making a simple favourites or preference type survey and so our shared one was similar. You can see it embedded in the post below.
Once complete, I sent out the link to this to my Twitter network (Look at the bottom of the Form edit page for the link – I used bit.ly to shorten it for Twitter, more on that later!) I did this because I wanted the children to see data being added, I wanted to demonstrate the moment of data submission from the Google Form. This also helps the children see how a spreadsheet is linked to the form. (15 minutes)
We switched to the spreadsheet and the children thought it was rather magical as the responses started to drop into the cells as we watched. I reminded them that as soon as someone clicks SUBMIT we were seeing the result.
The children then worked in groups of three with a single laptop (2 groups per table) – one of the children signed into their Google Docs (part of Google Apps for Education) account and created their own “Favourites” Google Form. To keep the children focused I asked them to only give 5 choices for their questions otherwise they tend to get longwinded and only create one or two questions. (15 minutes)
One of the useful things about writing up lesson experiences on my blog is that it is wonderful to go back and look at what I learned and make adjustments to lessons. With some of these things in mind, once the groups had made their Forms, rather than share via email etc (this just adds a complication) we clicked on the Live Form link at the foot of the page.
So everyone had on their laptop screens their form and I asked them to simply change places with those on their table and complete each others’ surveys. They then moved around the classroom adding their responses to other forms from other groups. Although it is nice to share via email, in my experience of working with Google Forms and lots of children it is much easier to move the children rather than share the Form. The children certainly got more responses this way and contributed more, there was less in the way.
After each child had submitted their responses they clicked on the Go Back to the form link which reset the form for the next child – this worked out really well. (15 minutes)
Up to this point the children were able to appreciate how Google Forms is a great way to gather information and how it organises it for us in the spreadsheet.
Back at their own Google Form the children spent some time exploring the results Summary page to look at how their data can be represented. (5 minutes)
As a class we returned to our Edu Favourites survey of educators in my Twitter network. By the end of my second session we had over 125 responses and it was a great pool of data to explore. Real data from real people that we literally witnessed being entered. I was able to ask children lots of questions from how it was represented. It proved to be a great plenary. Here are the results from the survey, there are currently 170 responses – thankyou if you were one of them. (5 minutes)
As a final exploration of this whole process you could explore the link data. I used bit.ly to shorten the long Google Form URL. bit.ly provides traffic data, with a free account, and you can show the class where the people clicking on the form are from. Currently there have been 269 clicks on the Edu Favourites form link and here is where everyone is from.
You could even do some work on how many didn’t fill in the form and compare it to those who did.
Thankyou for taking the time to help with our maths lesson today, I am always so grateful for your contributions – and some of you have even gone away wondering what Marmite is – life will never be the same again. By the way I hate it too!
This post includes some reflections on the use of Google Forms in data handling teaching and some problems we encountered in using them in the classroom.
For a few weeks now we have been exploring data handling in our numeracy lessons – we have included lots of work to allow children the choice of some current tools to use in their own investigations. In separate lessons we have explored how to use Create-a-Graph, Google Forms for collecting data and Excel for charting data. All of this exposure and practice in using these tools was a precursor to the children making some choices in the design of their own data investigation.
The children were working in small groups of 3s (about 10 groups) and the majority of them chose to collect the data for their investigation questions using a Google Form. I directed one child from each group to author the form and to share with all of their peers within the domain. (This was done by clicking on “EMAIL FORM” when editing the form and clicking on “CHOOSE FROM CONTACTS” and choosing “ALL CONTACTS” from the drop down menu)
I decided to build in some time for the children to complete the forms that different groups were sharing with them. And this is where we began to run into problems. The progress of each group was starting to stretch out – some were completing forms and some had lots of data, others had only a few results because the forms had not been completed yet. The difference in what they may be doing was also beginning to mean that I had no way of ensuring a specific group was at a certain stage.
The simple fact is that I had no way of ensuring that every child completed every form. As a result the pool of data was different for each group.
I still believe that using a Google form is a valid way of collecting data – it also organises info and even produces a graphical representation of it. A powerful tool. But it is difficult when trying to collect lots of data from a year group at the same time. If their are lots of forms from lots of different groups it becomes unwieldy and difficult to steer on the right track. Saying that, I still wanted to provide the choice of tools to the children, attempting to replicate what happens in real life.
Here is a possible solution that we have thought of:
