Using Google Forms Quizzes for Distance Learning
Distance Learning or not, I may be the biggest fan of Google Classroom. This all goes back to 2013 when the night before a big chemistry presentation during my junior year of college, my laptop cracked in half. Literally at the hinge. I brought it to the Geek Squad to see if they could put it back together, but they let me know they handled software problems, not so much hardware stuff.
Being your typical broke college student, I went to the sales floor and asked the employee for a cheap, but super functional laptop, and in came my first Chromebook. Putting everything on the cloud, and working in Google Slides instead of the alternatives made me SO HAPPY. No matter where I was working all of my files were synchronized, and I never had to worry about leaving a USB drive stuck in a computer and walking away from it to never see it again.
During my first year teaching, I needed to teach the entire curriculum in one semester. Long story… I started on a different distance learning platform, but when I stumbled upon Google Classroom I was sold. It gave me everything I needed to teach my curriculum at an accelerated pace. My kids needed to do a lot of learning on their own, and this gave me the means to give them those materials.
Whether distance learning is students going home and teaching themselves, or living during a pandemic (2020 – I’m over it) Google Classroom has come in clutch. My favorite part of Google Classroom is using Google Forms for quizzes.
Features of Google Forms
During 2020 distance learning I use videos to teach my students, and I use Google Forms as my assessment piece. I like to use the multiple choice question type, because you can assign both a correct answer and a point value. This makes the question “self-grading.”
I also love using the checkbox question option as well. This is really great for surveys, but I like it for questions that have more than one answer. These are self grading as well. Are you catching my drift, here? Distance learning and distance teaching are hard enough as it is. Using a self grading platform is like winning the teacher lottery.
Earlier this school year, Google introduced “Locked Mode” for the quizzes, meaning that when in the quiz, no other tabs can be opened – this is a great way to reduce students searching for answers elsewhere on the internet. I haven’t used that option, but it is available to you! You can also scramble the questions for each kid, making it a bit more difficult for them to communicate their answers with each other. If you use this in the classroom, this is a great tool if you ever needed to do digital tests. Scrambling questions makes it harder to look at each other’s screens. It’s effectively like giving different versions of a paper test.
Distance Learning Data Collection using Google Forms
Another reason I love Google Forms for distance learning is the built in data collection it does. Forms will give you a graph of the students’ scores so you have an idea of the number of kids who are successful in distance learning.
You can also look into the specifics of each question to figure out where your students are struggling. When I know the most common wrong answer, I can more easily find the disconnect between the content and the learning. Did you know that when the wrong answers spread somewhat evenly like in my picture, it usually indicates the kids who got it wrong guessed. When there is a popular wrong answer, it usually means that there was a disconnect in the teaching, or a gap the teacher didn’t anticipate. This is a great way to use data to guide your teaching and reteaching efforts! This is especially helpful for distance learning because it’s much harder to find your students’ struggles since you can’t get immediate feedback via their questions.
You also have the option to look at individual students and the answers that they chose. I really like this for doing a deep dive to figure out what a specific kid needs help with. I allow my students to take the quiz as many times as they like, but you can allow them to do the assignment just once. Because I only give multiple choice or checkbox questions, the entire assignment is self graded. This allows me to let Google give the students their grade as soon as they turn it in. You can also set it up so you release scores to the students, or you can grade it “by hand.” This is a great feature if you choose to incorporate short response or other written answers.
Last but not least, you can choose if you’d like your students to be able to see the quiz after they’ve finished. It shows them the missed questions and the correct answers. I always allow my students to see this information because I need them to become a bit more independent. Distance learning is very hard, and for that reason, I try to give my students as much information as I can about their progress. For more information about how I’m communicating with parents and students during distance learning, you can read this post!
