3 ways to use Google Forms to streamline your workflow

For exit tickets, student support & action research

use Google Forms to streamline your workflowUsing Google Forms and Google  Sheets together can streamline your process and make all your tasks feel just a little more manageable.

As an educator, it can be a bit overwhelming trying to keep all your different data streams organized, not to mention the finding the time to analyze and interpret that data! Let’s take three examples of how Google Forms can cut down on your paperwork flurries.

How schools are using Google Forms to streamline workflow

1. Exit tickets & feedback forms

The past few summers, at the Middle Grades Institute, we’ve used a Google Form exit ticket to quickly understand how participants are doing at the end of each day and quickly assess their needs for the next day. The responses are really easy to share with other facilitators or participants!

 

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The beauty of this tool is we can look at a summary of responses or by individual, if you require a name.

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Along these same lines, it’s conference season around here and it seems to becoming a common practice to survey parents, students, and teachers after the conference. Here, is an example from Crossett Brook Middle School:

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This information can be so valuable for understanding someone’s experiences as well as working towards improving the next round of conferences. To me, it also helps everyone feel like valued partners in this journey.

 

2. Student support teams

In every school there are students who need some additional level of support to be successful. One of the best ways to support these students is for everyone in their circle to be on the same page. This involves a lot of input from various sources and can be difficult to coordinate and organize.

Recently, Kate Grodin and her team at Winooski Middle School have started to implement this data collection process through Google forms. They used the conditional formatting feature to direct people to the appropriate section of the form.

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Link to the full Google Form

One form can be used for the initial data collection as well as subsequent collections that measure the success of different interventions. Multiple teachers can input data and easily report out.

3. Action Research

Action research has been a consistent vehicle for educators to engage in meaningful inquiry about a problem or question. We encourage all participants at the Middle Grades Institute to complete an action research project. Data collection is paramount in this process and, again, we have found Google Forms to help tremendously in this process.

Whether your data is qualitative or quantitative Forms has a way to collect and organize your information.

This data-driven action research project undertaken by educators at Mill River Union High School shows just how powerful Google Forms can be for research data. The educators sought to answer the question: “How does professional development affect technology integration?”

They used Google Forms to collect both quantitative:

using Google Forms to streamline your workflow

and qualitative data:

using Google Forms to streamline your workflow

to measure changes they made to their teaching practice.

 

Where else could you see Google Forms simplifying your school’s workflow?

Scott Thompson

Educator, Student advocate, husband, father, adventurer, outdoor enthusiast, cook, traveler, and former North American Nerf Golf Champion.

What do you think?