First Forms

I've been using Google Apps myself and with my after-school GATE students since I first "met" them. One of my challenges is to consider how to introduce colleagues to Google Apps, and how to make them applicable to use with students.
A recent thread in a group trying to solve a colleague's challenge made me think of forms. While the process of creating forms seems to be the least collaborative, I think they are very easy AND can help to gather information quickly. They can even be used for grading tests, which I hadn't even considered before my training in October.
Today, I created forms for my students to access from a web address. The purpose of the form was to gather students' comments about peers' projects, and recommendation for inclusion into our first annual film festival. I simply asked for the feedback, listing each of the participating students, and then had students fill out the form.
Challenges: I wanted to easily duplicate a form and make changes to it, and I didn't see that process easily. I did it once, and then found it more efficient to just start over. I need to get that working better. I also found that I got confused between WHICH URLs I was using, since different ones refer to the form itself that the students will fill out or to the results I receive. I will get better about this.

The easy thing would be that students could access a form embedded in a teacher web page from school or home. Homework would look very different, won't it, if students didn't have to turn in anything, and could even access their work from the school library or home computer. Grading spelling (my most hated task as an English teacher) would be a breeze!

I did share the results with a colleague, and we both saw huge potential for improving teacher efficiency and for gathering instant feedback while in the computer lab, whether for a class-wide test/quiz or other. We also saw the benefit to all of the results being printed on one or two pieces of paper per class, rather than a page for each student. My next steps will be to gather examples of forms used so that we can get ideas.