Using Google Forms to Track Student Work | Teacher Tutorial

Raise your hand if you’ve ever emailed yourself information pertaining to a student so you were reminded of it later or it was at least documented somewhere that existed outside of your brain?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a pile of paper rubrics you completed after some student performance-based work that you then needed to add into your online grade book?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been asked “well, did you call the parents?” when in a meeting about an issue with a particular students’ performance or behavior.

I don’t know about you, but to me that seems like, and for me was at some point, a whole lot of physical and mental clutter in the forms of paper and unorganized thoughts I needed to recall at any given and very important moment.

I have a solution for you.

In today’s video I’m not just going to talk about “How to use Google Forms in your classroom” - nope, we’re going to get real specific and talk about how you can use Google Forms for YOU, not your students and their quizzes, or responses to you.  But instead, how you can use Google Forms to keep track of all the things that, well, teachers need to keep track of.

And here’s the really freeing thing - once you have this system in place, you don’t ever have to think about it again.  You don’t have to mentally hold onto every occurance inside your classroom as data for potential use in a parent conference some day.  Now, you get to go to your trusty Google Form your past self created, and BOOM - enter the important information and move the HECK on.

1. Student & Parent Info - this is a common one and it’s probably one you’ve heard before and don’t need me to explain extensively.  But here’s what I’ll say
1. Yes, the paper version of student or parent info is cute, but I can’t copy and paste from that physical piece of paper every single parent email in one fell swoop like I can from a Google Form of information that was filled out correctly by someone other than me.
2. Make a Google Group or email thread per class, however you need that info… now you can select it all in two clicks and plop it where you need it.  That’s not possible on paper.
2. Some kind of performance based work from your students that usually only you will look at
1. Not necessarily for grading essays - students need to see that, and rubrics on Google Classroom are the BOMB for that.
2. This is more for tracking purposes, not feedback purposes.
3. Story time - my binder system - tell the story and show the how
4. How else could you use this… think of anything that you track on a regular basis whether that’s daily, weekly, monthly, by unit, quarterly, etc.
3. Documentation purposes - anything that you need to document so that there is evidence of xyz happening either in your classroom or documentation of your due diligence - let’s put it this way, it’s documentation to CYA
1. Parent communication
2. Small group or 1-1 student conferencing
4. Organizing the spreadsheet
1. How to break the responses from the existing form so you can keep that spreadsheet, but responses now go to a new sheet for your most recent data