The Schoenblog

I’ve seen a lot of discussion lately about the concept of delaying grades based on Kristy Louden’s awesome article, Delaying the Grade: How to Get Students to Read Feedback, over at the equally awesome Cult of Pedagogy.

She argues that if you have students focus on reading feedback and self assessing their work before addressing the grade, the feedback becomes more meaningful. I wholeheartedly agree, and have seen many educators jumping into the conversation with their own practices and strategies. I’ve thought a lot about my own grading and feedback beliefs and policies this year, and done a lot of work to be better.

Louden writes, “Wow, glad I put so much time into that assignment, said no teacher ever.” We spend so long grading and providing feedback, but too often it ends up crumpled in backpacks or garbage cans. Online feedback is great because it’s harder to lose or misplace, but it still can be a struggle to get students to read it. We need to stop doing the same thing and expecting different results. We need to stop the insanity.

Louden explains her methods, continuing, “The simple act of delaying the grade meant that students had to think about their writing. They had to read their own writing—after a few weeks away from it—and digest my comments, which allowed them to better recognize what they did well or not so well. The response from students was extremely positive; they understood the benefit of rereading their essays and paying attention to feedback. One boy said, ‘Mrs. Louden, you’re a genius. I’ve never read what a teacher writes on my essay before, and now I have to.’”

For more on grades and feedback I recommend checking out ”Changing the Conversation: Grades vs. Learning” by Starr Sackstein and ASCD’s Seven Keys to Effective Feedback from Grant Wiggins.

Feedback Conferences

I wish I was better at face-to-face, individual conferences about student work. Louden conferences with her students--and this is fantastic--but it’s never been my strong suit. What I’m really good at is using technology to provide specific, focused, and timely feedback to students. This shouldn’t entirely replace the conference--I wish I did this more often and better--but it can be a nice tool to help make the feedback process easier in delaying grades.

Google Tools to Delay Grades

In addition to delaying the grade, I like to delay the feedback. To do so, I generally return digital or hard copies of student work without any comments. Then, I ask students to read, comment on, and assess their work using a rubric. Usually, I do this a few days or even a week after the writing is turned it--this time creates a separation from the student as the writer versus editor. With distance, my students are often about to be more objective, thoughtful, and constructive about their own work.

Sometimes, the student’s self-assessment makes it easier for me to provide feedback. I can reference their own comments and thoughts, and learn more about their understanding of their progress. Other times, I want to return my feedback immediately and use it to help them assess their own self-assessment and reflection. To do so, I turn to Google.

Google Classroom: Return with Purpose

Let’s start with the simple option: use Google Classroom to promote self-assessment and feedback and delay the grades. When a student turns work in on Classroom, they lose rights to edit. Use this transfer of sharing rights to have them provide feedback on paper or to add suggested comments about their own writing. Then, return the work to a class or any number of students to share your comments and/or grades.

Looking for more control and specificity in your feedback? Explore Google Forms below and its power to help delay the grade.

Google Forms and formMule

With my students’ most recent work, I created a feedback form to organize and maintain my feedback digitally. I read students’ writing and used this simple form (see below) to provide the feedback. Notice the drop down list of student names and the checkboxes for common feedback items. This makes it quick and easy to make the process effective--the same options repeat with a heading for improvement.

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.

Technology makes it easier for me to give more meaningful feedback to students more quickly and efficiently than ever before. It also allows me, and my students, to archive, share, and promote that work for authentic audiences and to connect and collaborate in transformative ways. Google Apps for Education offers many tools to help teachers improve their workflows, feedback, and collaboration, and for many #GoogleClassroom is essential in managing online work.

Since its launch last fall, Google Classroom was the tool that I used regularly to assign, collect, and provide feedback to most student work. It’s not the most robust system, but it does its job exceedingly well: it helps manage workflow and organization of work between the teacher and student.

The more I pushed my students to create for authentic audiences, though, I begun to shift my focus away from Classroom. It’s still my regular tool for assigning work and pushing resources out to my students, but no longer the only tool I use to collect the work. Classroom’s interface simply does not provide any easy way for me or my students to share their work and products with anyone but the teacher. Its role and purpose is incredibly important, but I needed more.

Enter #GoogleForms. Forms works for me where Classroom does not: it is robust, powerful, customizable, and databases data in Sheets. With these Sheets, I can organize, program, index, and share my student work. Often, this isn’t a Classroom vs. Forms debate, but lately I’ve realized the incredible power of combining these tools for more meaningful feedback and authentic sharing.

The Standard Disclaimer

I like my workflows and I love playing with Forms and Sheets because the potential is nearly unlimited. But what works for me might not work for everyone. I hope these ideas inspire you to reconsider your workflow and procedures but feel free to adapt, borrow, steal, or ignore--or even better, comment below or reach out on Twitter with your thoughts and strategies.


For more tips and tricks with Google Classroom or Forms, visit 4 Tools to Schedule Communication, Improve Feedback & Student Work, Making the Most of Google Classroom's Calendar Integration, and My Workflow for Responding to Student Writing in Classroom.

Classroom & Forms: Purpose Before Tools

I always want to design my learning objectives before I pick the activities or tools for the lesson. Similarly, I need to decide my purpose before picking my tool for collecting and interacting with student work.



Google Classroom is my preferred tool when students are sharing work with me for feedback. It allows for powerful interactions between the student and teacher. I comment in Google Docs or Slides and return the work with comments to students. I’m a huge fan of the ability to leave feedback by adding a private comment to each student, and then adding holistic feedback to the entire class or a group of students when returning the work. This is a huge time saver for me.

If you use rubrics to assess writing, I strongly recommend Classroom with the sheets add-on Doctopus to provide rubric-based feedback to students.

I still assign everything on Classroom because of the Calendar integration and to help keep all student information and work in one place, but students only turn the work in there when it deserves to be there. Otherwise, they mark it as done.



Google Forms are my go-to for work that I want to share. There is no easy way to organize or share student work through Classroom besides the share button; with Forms, I can collect addresses to shared work, along with any other data I want: e-mails, student names, class periods, comments about the work, etc.

Then, I can sort and organize the work. By adding addition sheets and using simple functions in Sheets like =SORT, I can organize the data however I want. For an example, check out my students’ #GeniusHour work at http://geniushour.aschoenbart.com.

Forms requires some work and some learning. If you’re looking to explore forms and sheets, here is a Functions List to get you started. Because of the versatility of add-ons and these functions, the potential of a Google Form and Sheet combo is unlimited.

Examples: Student Work & Forms

Antigone Background Projects

After researching elements of Greek mythology, my students created storybook presentations and turned in the link on a Google Form. Then, I organized the form results and published them to the web to create the Antigone Project Database.

Students then reviewed each other’s work with a Jigsaw activity through the shared Google Sheet. The sheet becomes a living archive of our creations and learning, as well as shared notes. When students turn in on Classroom, they write only for me but now they are creating for each other, too.

#GeniusHour

Similarly, students submitted their Genius Hour blogs and projects on a Google Form. At first, the form only asked about their topic and for their blog link. I allowed students to edit their responses and later added a question asking for their project links. Students were able to add the link to the same form, providing me with more data.

Then, I shared the link to our Genius Hour website (http://geniushour.aschoenbart.com) on Twitter and here, promoting their blogs, products, and projects. In using a Google Form and Sheet to share their work, students were able to connect with the world, find experts, and get comments from teachers and students around the world.




These are two of the many examples from my classes this year. We still use Classroom often, but when I want students to share the work, to archive it, or to connect with the world, Forms and Sheets are the better tool.

My Workflow

I used to have students turn everything in on Classroom and then also submit the links on a Form when it had purpose. Lately, I’ve steered away from turning in on Classroom unless it had added purpose. I still use Classroom to assign the forms and share the links with students. I also teach students to change sharing rights on all of their work so that anyone with the link can view.

I quickly began to miss the ability to see who submitted their work at a glance, which Classroom provides, and my solution took some careful Google Sheets planning. Create a form in the beginning of the year to generate a definitive roster of usernames, class periods, and student names. Then, you can use this list to cross-reference with students who submit work on a form.

Basically, column A is username, B class period, C first name, and D last name. Then, I add this function to each row in column E:

=IFERROR(VLOOKUP($B2,'Form Responses 1'!$B$1:$Z,2,False),"")

Copy this individual sheet to the Google Form that collects work (right click on the sheet → copy to) and it will lookup the students who have completed the form. At a basic level, this function assumes that column B of a sheet titled Form Responses 1 (the default form responses name) is usernames and compares the usernames of students who submitted the form to your master roster. When the student has completed it, their name will appear in column E.

I realize it’s not the easiest to explain in a narrative so I’ll have to create a model without student data soon to demonstrate. With a glance, I can now see which students have turned in the form with their links, and with some easy conditional formatting, I can even color code it.

What’s Your Purpose?

For me, it always comes back to purpose. What is my end goal for the learning and who is the product for? These questions drive my planning on how I collect, respond to, archive, and share student work.

With Classroom, the teacher can give feedback to the student. But with Forms, the work can be more easily shared with the world. For my classroom and 21st Century learning, that’s an easy choice: I want my students to create for the world.

And remember, it’s not always an either/or or all/nothing. Do what works for you and your students, but make sure that learning and purpose drives those choices.

What are your favorite strategies for working with student work? How have you used Classroom, Forms, or other tools in creative ways? Share in the comments or on Twitter.

For more of my writing about using Classroom, Forms, and Sheets together, check out The Pros and Cons of Google Forms in Classroom, Managing Late and Revised Student Work in Classroom, or The Schoencast: Tips for Viewing Form Responses in Sheets.

Welcome back to the third episode of The Schoencast. The goal of these screencasts is to provide strategies and guides to improving edtech workflows and productivity. With more effective workflows, organization, and more automation, we can spend more time on what matters: our students.

It’s been a while since the last episode; I quickly learned that screencasts take a lot of time. But I hope to do them more regularly moving forward. Please check out past episodes, 01: Form Mule and 02 Automating Tweets From a Class Twitter: An Updated Workflow.

Tips for Viewing Google Form Results in Sheets

I love Google Forms and Sheets. But sometimes it can be hard to manage the data and make meaningful use of the information. Whether you use forms for data, assessment, feedback, or to track student work, life is better when the spreadsheets are more easily viewed.

In this episode, I walk you through five tips for better use of form results:

1. Summary of Responses
2. Freezing Rows and Columns
3. Hiding Rows and Columns
4. Resizing Cells
5. Formatting Word Wrap

Below the episode, find two bonus tips to increase your impact and productivity. If you’re looking for more use cases for forms or sheets, here are few articles worth checking out, too: The 5 Best Google Forms & Sheets Add-ons for Teachers, The Pros & Cons of Google Forms in Classroom, and Managing Late & Revised Student Work in Classroom & Forms.

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

The answer is always a Google Form. The problem, question, or situation doesn’t really matter; Google Forms is the answer. It’s the most powerful and versatile of all Google Apps, and can be used for a variety of purposes: data collection, assessment, feedback, sign up/RSVP, and so many more. Once you consider forms and sheets add-ons, the potential for forms to help with organization and communication is unlimited. I’m being hyperbolic for sure, but I could write a blog just on forms with new content for teachers regularly….and maybe I will.

First, credit where credit's due. In this post, you will find my workflow for creating an automated Tweeting process that allows students to submit Tweets via Google Forms and have them automatically moderated and Tweeted through a class Twitter account. While I certainly didn’t invent this idea or process, I did update the workflow to add some power to the automation based on some blog posts and great ideas from other valuable sources. Jump to the bottom of this post for Episode 2 of the SchoenCast, which walks you through the process, if you want to get right down to it.

First, thanks to John Calvert for his session on this topic at a New Jersey conference last year, and for his blog post, Using FormMule and IFTTT for a moderated student twitter feed. Alice Keeler has a cool workflow using Google Sheets to set up Tweets at Class Twitter Account: How Your Students Can Tweet, but it’s really her article, Google Forms: Get a Pre-Filled URL in 5 Easy Steps, that added the magic to my process. Finally, thanks to Dan Gallagher for asking great questions and getting my brain turning on this project. He writes about his process at Great Ideas Are Started With: “Is there a way…”

Bruce Tweets: @MrSchoenbart is testing his awesome automated Twitter system! #SchoenTell

— #SchoenTell (@SchoenTellOHS) October 19, 2015