The Schoenblog

We need to work smarter, not harder. And when we work harder, it should be on the things that matter.

It’s an unfortunate truth about education that we’re so often bogged down and overwhelmed by red tape and paperwork, making it hard to manage our time. So when technology can help us manage time more effectively, make our work easier and more efficient, and clean up some of that literal or metaphorical red tape, we need to let it and celebrate it.

And this summer’s updates to Google Forms help us to just that--they help make form creation and use more efficient so we can stop reinventing the wheel and get more out of our time.

The new Google Forms became the default Forms for G Suite back in February of 2016, and since then there’s been a handful of updates: images for questions and answers, predicting question types, easier templates, and more.

But it’s the newer updates that really excite me because they problem solve real problems for educators and schools. These are updates I want and have asked for; they will actually lead to more effective and powerful use of forms in my practice. So update by update, let’s explore why.

#GoogleForms’ Summer Updates

For the Google Blog article about these new features, click here. The images below are from this article.

Intelligent Validation

Response validation is an incredibly useful feature, but it can be a challenge to use well. Click the three dots in the bottom right corner of a Form question, and select validation. Then, you can create a custom rule for the question and an error message when that rule is broken.

Think back to the last time you’ve entered your e-mail address wrong on a form. You forget the @ and the form knows it’s not an e-mail, reminding you to please enter a valid e-mail address. That’s response validation.

But it has so much more power than that--want a 10-digit phone number? A word that’s 12 characters? A short response of no more than 20 words? Exactly 4 checkbox selections? Validation can do that with what’s called regular expressions; the article, Useful Regular Expressions for Validating Input in Google Forms, walks you through the possibilities.

For a US Zip Code, the regular expression is: ^\d{5,6}(?:[-\s]\d{4})?$

Huh? What does that even mean? Google’s new intelligent validation solves the problem of the confusing regular expression and predicts the validation based on the question (see the image below). It remains to be seen how powerful and complex the feature becomes; will it only predict e-mail, web address, and whole numbers, or complex expressions, too? It’s too early to tell, but with intelligent machine learning, the possibilities are powerful and exciting.

For now, it means that it will be a lot harder for a student to type in the wrong e-mail address or share an invalid web address.

Upload Files Outside Your Domain

Uploading files to a Google Form was a hot request for a long time, but for me, Google Classroom, and even Drive, have made it loose meaning. Why do I need to have students submit files on a Form when they can turn them in on Classroom or share on Drive?

The answer, or one answer, is to share with others, too. When the file is uploaded, it’s organized on the response Sheet, which is easy to share and organize. This is an easy way to share student work and ideas outside of your classroom.

The new addition of uploading files outside your domain isn’t as important for students, but for schools and organizations. Want parents to submit art for a yearbook ad? Do teachers need to submit receipts? How about invoices from vendors? As a former theatre director, I even paid for another service to create a form where parents could upload artwork for the playbill. At the time, this was something worth paying for to me.

While it’s easy to share with Drive, for someone new to Google, the upload feature is familiar and powerful. It can make school business, clubs, and similar submissions a whole lot easier.

Default Settings

During the school year, I probably create a dozen forms a week. That might be a low number in some weeks. And each time, the first thing I do is adjust the settings. Collect e-mail addresses. Restrict to our domain. Often, only one submission is allowed.

I’ve gotten smarter and sometimes create a template form with all of my settings, and then create copies in Drive. But that’s extra work I shouldn’t have to do. When I’m working with students, I know that I ALWAYS want to collect their e-mail addresses because I want to eliminate user error. I want default settings.

And, thankfully, now we have them. The image below details the new default choices, and I hope they become more robust. Submission attempts, response messages, and more should all be customizable as defaults.

For me, this change matters so much, but I hope it continues to evolve.

Checkbox Grid

Have you ever had to use a site like doodle.com for scheduling because you couldn’t figure out how to get a Form to work for that particular question? Now you don’t have to.

I’m curious about other uses for this question type--I don’t have them yet--but it’s a simple and obvious addition.

Reorder Sections

We need to be able to reorder Form sections. I’m not sure there’s anything more to say about that, but it’s an important change. This is especially true if you like to play with branching forms and pages; our work just got easier.



It’s not just these changes that excite me, but the potential for the future. I love that Google is always iterating and updating it’s G-Suite products, and that they always look for feedback from education. I’d love to see some of these features continue to grow, and can’t wait to try them in my classroom, school, and practice soon.

What are some uses you see for these new #GoogleForms features? What changes would you like to see next? Please share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter @MrSchoenbart.

A reality of freshman English is that many students struggle with organization and clear development of their ideas. We use some scaffolding and acronyms to help students develop strong writing, and reinforce them throughout the year. This helps students to develop more purposeful and thoughtful writing, which provides a strong foundation to build off of throughout the year.

To help students reflect on organization, many teachers ask students to deconstruct or reconstruct writing samples. Simply cut up a model paragraph or work and have students reconstruct it, organize it, and reflect on their choices. My coteacher and I decided to take that to the next level, inspired by use of Google Slides and Google Draw for magnetic activities.

To learn more about these magnetic activities, check out my article on our use of Halloween Magnetic Poetry, inspired by Kasey Bell’s original post here. Eric Curts also explores these strategies in his awesome Build a Snowman with Google Slides and Wintertime Magnetic Poetry with Google Drawings.

Magnetic Puzzle Poetry

We wrote a sample paragraph, modeled on student work. Earlier in the week, they outlined one in class, making the sample more authentic to their writing. Then, using Google Slides and the Nimbus Screenshot Chrome Extension, I cut the paragraph up into its parts, mixed it all up, and asked students to reconstruct it. See the animation below for an example of how it worked or click here to make a copy of the slides for yourself.



Students collaborated to reorganize this paragraph, and you can see the end result on slide 2 above featured at the end of the GIF.

Then, students reflected on Google Classroom. Being able to organize and reorganize the piece was great, but this reflection of their process and understanding was essential. Students were asked to improve one part of this paragraph by rewriting the sentence and explaining why they made this choice.

Magnetic How To

Adapting the magnetic activity to your own class is easy with Google Slides or Draw and any screenshot tool. Instead of creating screenshot images, you can also insert different text boxes to the slides, too. I chose the images so students couldn’t edit the text.

To create a background, like my grid, right click on a slide and change the background to an image. I created the grid right in Slides and downloaded it as a .jpg. Then, I uploaded the image and set it as my slide background.

After screenshotting the parts of the paragraph and labels, I simply moved them to the left and right of the slide and mixed up the order. Then, on Classroom, I assigned the file by making a copy for each student. In the end, students can turn in the work and can also download their work from Slides or Draw as an image to share.

Magnetic activities like these are great for fun and creative tasks like magnetic poetry and to work on organization skills. Right now, my students need the structure that this activity provides, giving us a nice starting point for more sophisticated writing and new choices in the future. I also like the idea of students being able to download their work and share it on social media, like we did with our Halloween Magnetic Poetry.

How have you used Google Slides or Draw in your classroom? Share your lessons or activities in the comments or on Twitter @MrSchoenbart.

Thank you, Google. One of my favorite things about Google Apps for Education is the constant evolution of the products and the way they interact with the users. Google recognizes some of the challenges within the education world and actively tries to help us solve them. And with the new updates to Google Forms to create quizzes, they have really given us something important.

I love nothing more than building complex Forms, tinkering with Sheets, and developing automatic workflows for feedback, grading, and communication. I might write about Forms and Sheets more than any other topic. And I LOVE the customization and personal touch that I can put on every project with add-ons and formulas.

But I think Google just made it all a lot simpler for everyone, from the Forms newbie to the #GAFE veterans. Since I’m #NotAtISTE2016, I’m watching the announcements on Twitter and playing along virtually. This morning, the Google for Education blog announced four updates in the post, Updates from ISTE: 4 new tools to help teachers do what they do best.

Check it out out--they’re all exciting. But for now, I'm going to focus exclusively on the Google Forms quiz feature, which allows users to create quizzes that will be graded automatically and can deliver targeted feedback. This really could be the biggest game changer in communication and assessment for Google since the release of Classroom.

Find all of my writing about Google Forms here, or check out recent articles like Using Data for Better Learning with #GoogleForms, #GoogleClassroom vs #GoogleForms for Interacting with Student Work, and The Pros and Cons of Google Forms in #Classroom.

New Google Forms Quizzes

Here’s why the new quizzes matter: they are set up in Google Forms. Previously, we had to use add-ons like Flubaroo in Google Sheets to set up automatic grading, which were really effective but not the best with targeted feedback. Now, using just Google Forms, quizzes can be graded, students receive feedback, and data is analyzed automatically. This saves time, clicks, and manual programming, allowing teachers to spend more time on students and learning.

Does this eliminate the need for Flubaroo? My first instinct is to say yes, with the disclaimer that I’ve yet to try the quizzes with students but only in some isolated practice. However, Google is doing a great job of making their core apps more fully functional and dynamic to help transform teaching, learning, and workflow.

How to Use Quizzes

In the Forms settings, you will see a new option for Quizzes in the menu. These settings allow you to set the grading as manual or automatic and to allow respondents to see missed questions, correct answers, and their point values.



Once a Form is set as a Quiz, you can assign the correct answers to each question. The quiz features only work with multiple choice or checkbox questions. Notice the ability to assign different point values and to provide targeted feedback. When a student gets the question right, I gave positive feedback, and when they got it wrong, I gave a link to review the answer. I love the ability to include a link in the targeted response. 

Data-driven instruction is one of those buzzwords in today’s educational landscape. We hear all about data, but if your experience is anything like mine, you’ve never really been trained to do much with it.

Sure, we give pre-assessments and set goals for post-assessments, growth, and student success, but it often feels like we’re doing so only to play (and win at) the game of public education. Of course I want my students to succeed--but I want to facilitate authentic opportunities to help them learn and grow, not meet arbitrary growth standards set outside my classroom or school--or any school at all.

Most of my data-driven experiences haven’t really been about student learning in the past, but I do value data--we need to be able to communicate learning and growth--so I set out to find easy strategies to use it more meaningfully this year. Sometimes we see learning in a look, a gesture, or a smile, but other times it takes writing or numbers to better describe, qualify, and quantify that growth.

As we gear up towards the end of the school year and my students prepare for their final exams, I used Google Forms more and more to formatively assess learning and growth and to better plan my teaching and reteaching. With a really simple Google Form, I could track success and growth, and use data to drive my instruction to best meet my students needs.

The Form: What, Why, and How

The assignment and practice that sparked this idea and post was a Common Core Reading Comprehension multiple choice section. This practice and growth on it was important for us because it’s part of the standards and my final exam. More importantly, reading comprehension and analysis is an important life skill (although I wish education didn't rely on multiple choice assessment so often--but that's a different conversation). Feel free to substitute your own content or skill-based concept; any sort of checklist or multiple choice questions will work well. This could range from multiple choice, rubric feedback, assignment guidelines, peer evaluation, and so much more.

My students completed the reading comprehension practice at home. I then sent an answer key to them using Remind and Google Classroom. After they scored themselves, they logged their wrong answers and total number correct in a Google Form. You can find a public copy of the most recent version here.

The form asks for the total number of correct answers, which questions students got wrong (checkbox style--select all that apply), how long they spent on the practice, and which type of questions they had trouble with. This time, I added a paragraph text box to ask students what they still wanted to review. Sometimes I’ll separate the questions by passage for easier analysis. The form only take a few minutes for students to fill out but provides us all with valuable data.

Click here to make a copy of my form.

The Data: Summary of Responses

The Google Forms Summary of Responses is a beautiful tool. With a click, it provides easy and effective data analysis, and it does so automatically. See the animated GIF below to see how if you haven’t used this feature before. It’s a game changer.



Now, when I needed to clarify problematic questions, I knew which ones they were. I didn’t have to rely on a handful of student volunteers that may or may not represent the whole class nor did I have to painstakingly review every student’s work. This data was for them more than it was me--it was to push their learning forward. It helped us see our common strengths and weaknesses and collaborate to grow. I shared screenshots from the summary online and asked students to select the hardest questions and troubleshoot them.

Then, we analyzed the types of questions and what they were asking for to find trends in the data. As a class, we were able to practice multiple choice skills and troubleshooting, all while improving our own understandings. The graph below is my favorite visual aid to help communicate its power; I not only know where my students need help but I can track their growth and improvement, too. All with the data to prove it.

Data Driven Change

With this data, I can better adapt my lessons and instruction to meet students needs. I can use graphs like the ones below to address time management or analyze question types, and tailor my class time to instruction that is more effective and purposeful with this data and assessment.

My lessons this week rely on Google Classroom, Forms, Docs, GMail, Remind, and so much more. In my mind each has a distinctive purpose and my choices support learning objectives and outcomes. But my mind is a weird place--it’s a chaotic mashup of tech and pedagogy, where my long, sometimes convoluted workflows work for me--but do they work for my students?

Are we giving our students too many options and norms? Is my tech-infused style of communication and feedback too much of a good thing?

Last week, I wrote about the power of Google Forms in addition to, or even instead of, collecting and providing feedback to students in Google Classroom. Click here to read #GoogleClassroom vs. #GoogleForms for Interacting with Student Work. With more reflection, I’ve started to think about the self-efficacy in technological communication. With technology, my communication and feedback can be more meaningful, specific, and efficient than ever before, and it also has permanence. Transparency and accountability increases when the reliability and consistency of communication improves and we have timestamped records of submissions and online interactions.

Still, when I return student work on Classroom, students find their feedback on Classroom or in their e-mail. When I automate a Google Form, it’s usually through e-mail, too. But then our gradebooks are in the school’s learning management system, so no matter where the grades started, they end up in the LMS gradebook. This is where the averages are calculated and the students information is communicated to parents and administration.

Are we giving students too many choices or destinations?

I see a clear and distinctive difference in the apps and how and why I use each to return student work. Still, if the destination for that returned work changes every time, than the execution is flawed no matter my intent. I need to students to be able to easily and consistently read, use, and grow from my feedback and communication.

Building an E-Mail Culture

So far, I’ve asked more questions than I have answers for. Do we teach students to value the app-smashing mindset that I live by--or do I need to adapt to streamline my work to meet their needs? I think the answer lies in a balance, and in the end I need to do what works for my students, just like you do for yours.

For my students, I think that means that building a culture where e-mail matters. With texts and social media, most of my students don’t use e-mail the ways I do--as a personal and professional form of communication. Many don’t even know how to write a formal or professional e-mail or letter. But this type of communication is essential in 21st century learning

This year, I’ve used e-mail to provide feedback on student work, automate responses on Forms, express concerns about student work, and make contact with parents. Sometimes this works great. Sometimes my students don’t check their e-mail and my message is lost. E-mail and technology can never replace face to face conversation--and that’s something I think I need to consider more often--but has much more value than my students give it credit for. I want to teach my students to write e-mails and to make checking e-mail regularly a norm in my classroom and school.

Since Classroom notifies students of new assignments and work through e-mail and my automated Forms does the same, that might just solve my problems for now. If students check their school e-mails regularly, we can use technology to communicate more effectively and make feedback matter.

Still, my concerns remain. How much is too much?

How do you find the balance in communication and feedback? What tools do you find most effective? Does education have too much of a good thing, and if so, what are the consequences? Share your thoughts in the comments below or on Twitter.

One of the most important goals from the #GAFE Impact Report was to determine how teachers were using Google Apps for Education in their classrooms and what they needed to use it more regularly and effectively. The more we understand about teachers’ use, perceptions, and needs, the better they can be addressed to increase teacher comfort and impact and affect student learning.

Most teacher and students saw the positive impact of GAFE on student learning, engagement, and the quality of work, but most teachers’ needs were not met. They needed more access, time, and training to really be able to incorporate technology meaningfully in their classrooms. I had hoped for the data from this study to support what I already knew to be true: we were making great steps forward but not doing enough to support professional learning and development in technology.

In this post, I will share an overview of what the teachers shared about their use and needs. While the data probably isn’t surprising, it is important as it validates what many of us already know: we need recursive, timely, and hands-on professional learning for regular and effective technology implementation in our classrooms.

This post is part 4 in my series #GAFE Impact Report, sharing data and analysis about student and teacher perceptions of the impact of Google Apps for Education. The results come from a 2014 survey I designed, implemented, and analyzed in my school. Be sure to check out Part 1: Overview & Infographic, Part 2: Comparing Surveys & Data, and Part 3: Summary of Findings & Analysis. Though limited to my school, I believe these results to be informative and representative of many schools in the early stages of GAFE integration. Please share your thoughts and feedback on these posts, the survey, or the findings in the comments or on Twitter.

GAFE Use & Impact

65% of teachers agree that GAFE has a positive impact on student learning and 35% agree that it positively impact teacher instruction. Interestingly, the disagree statistics were small (9% and 16%, respectively) and the undecided much higher. This made perfect sense as many teachers did not have regular access to technology to training to use it, so they were still undecided about the impact.

However, only 35% of teachers felt prepared to use GAFE effectively in the classroom and 40% of teachers say the have been able to use GAFE more than sometimes this school year. While the impact and positive perceptions are there, we needed to do more to increase training and access.

When asked which GAFE tools they were using, teachers most often responded with Drive, Communities, Classroom, and Sites.

What Teachers Need

Teacher need more access to technology and more training to use it effectively:




In written responses, almost every teacher wrote about the need for more training. According the survey results, teachers want training in the following areas:

• How to use GAFE with individual training for the different apps
• How to teach students to use GAFE and Chromebooks
• How to implement GAFE in the classroom for best practices
• How to implement GAFE for specific subject area classes or student populations
• Concrete modeling and examples of best practices 

Most commonly, teachers requested small group trainings over a long period of time during contractual hours rather than opt-in trainings outside of the school day.

One Year Later

It’s been over a year since the #GAFE Impact Report and a lot has changed since then. More and more teachers have access to technology and we’ve offered multiple cohorts of opt-in training along with differentiated sessions during professional development days as much as possible.

Next time I write about this survey and analysis, I’d like to address how it’s changed my views on professional learning and the ways we’ve evolved since. One day soon, I’d like to update the survey and try it again to see how the data supports the shifts I’ve seen in my school. As a technology coach, I have the privilege of visiting classrooms and experiencing this change but having the data to support it is always valuable.

Now you, dear reader, have access to it all: the Summary Report, Comparative Data, Infographic, Student Survey, and Teacher Survey. I hope it helps you improve professional learning to impact students through technology.

As always, please leave your comments below or reach out on Twitter. I would love to hear what you think about this study, your own ideas about GAFE’s impact, or ways to improve the study for next time.

This post is part 2 in my series #GAFE Impact Report, sharing data and analysis about student and teacher perceptions of the impact of Google Apps for Education. The results come from a 2014 survey I designed, implemented, and analyzed in my school. Be sure to check out Part 1: Overview & Infographic. Though limited to my school, I believe these results to be informative and representative of many schools in the early stages of GAFE integration. Please share your thoughts and feedback on these posts, the survey, or the findings in the comments or on Twitter.

Once the inspiration for this study hit, I knew what I needed to do. Ideas, questions, and complications circled through my mind for a few days. I listed my ideas, tried to put them in order, and to figure out what I was really looking for. Who did I want to survey? How? Where? Why? What was I going to do with the data? I had some answers to these questions and more ideas than I knew what to do with. Little did I know it at the time, but a lot of this process was what led me to my current doctoral studies. With the #GAFE Impact Report, I learned a lot of survey design, methodology, and data analysis, which helped focus my interests back towards further studies.

Luckily, I had some friends at work to bounce ideas off of and quickly made some decisions. I would create Google forms for all teachers and students. Students were easy; I could ask my English teacher colleagues to assign the survey, either in class or for homework. I decided to collect usernames in my domain so I could ensure unique responses from each students and let teachers know when their students had all completed it--although their responses remained private. For the teachers, I e-mailed a different Google form with a plea for their help. I explained my goals and purpose and asked that they complete the form over a two-week window. I then followed up in person with some departments, and after a lot of leg work had overall success. Although my administration okayed my work, it was important that I ask for honest feedback and data as a colleague and not as a forced or mandated survey from a supervisor.

The surveys took a while to design and finalize, and I’m pretty happy with the questions I asked, even now. By Thanksgiving or so, I was ready to roll out my baby.

Survey Design

Thankfully, my friend and mentor Tina has her PhD. She had the knowledge, experience, and insight into survey design, methodology, and motivating busy teachers to respond, which I sorely lacked. I didn’t need a doctoral-level project here, but I wanted to make sure that my study was fair, purposeful, and meaningful. She helped me decide on a mixed-methods approach, including both quantitative and quantitative questions.

The quantitative questions provided the hard data and were required. The qualitative ones asked for supporting responses, and some were optional. I wanted to make the survey easy for responders, with the hopes that this would give me more in depth responses. And it mostly worked. There were some topics, like the value of electronic feedback, that were important to me, but ultimately proved to be too much. I wanted to survey to be clear and focused, so I tried to connect everything back to the impact of Google Apps on Teaching and Learning.

Students

The students survey asked about when, how, and why they used GAFE, and about its impact on teaching, learning, engagement, etc. It took most students about 20 minutes to complete.

Find the student survey here.

Teachers

The teacher survey asked almost all of the same questions for the teacher's perspective but had an extra layer. All students at OHS had used Google to some degree, so all of their responses were valuable. But for teachers who had never really used GAFE in their teaching, some of the questions were designed to fail--or at least collect vague or incomplete data. I can’t expect a clear understanding of the impact of GAFE if a teacher hasn’t used it in his or her teaching.

Instead, I used the page branching feature in Google Forms to differentiate the questions. The first page is the same for all teachers and ends with the question: How often have you been able to use GAFE in your classroom this year? Teachers who answered always, often, or sometimes continued with an evaluation of its impact. Those who replied rarely or never followed with questions about why they hadn’t used it and what they would need to use it more.

Find the teacher survey here.

I pride myself on having taught in a blended classroom for the past few years. Without Google Apps, Chromebooks, and technology, my lessons wouldn’t be effective with their current design. But without me--the teacher--they wouldn’t be effective either. I struggle sometimes finding the balance between facetime and screentime, both in my classroom and home life--for me and students.

My Top 3 Tools for Flipped Activities

What impact does #GAFE have on teaching and learning?

Last year, this was the question on my mind. I had just left GAFE Summit NY, one of my first conferences, and was awed at how much everyone was talking about the positive impact of Google Apps for Education (GAFE), Chromebooks, and technology. I attended great sessions, watched my Director of Technology discuss our district’s Chromebook rollout and professional development models, and I even presented about how GAFE has changed my teaching and my students’ learning. But I left wondering about the real impact, which at the time meant numbers for me.

The Plan