Create surveys using Google Forms and Spreadsheets

I am teaching a class called "Math for Life" this year.  One of the units that we are working on is Statistics.  After our many discussions it is time to create our own surveys to gather statistics and then analyze them.  This first blog post is about how to go about creating a survey using Google Forms.  Here is a sample survey that I created for my classes if you wouldn't mind take a minute or two to fill it out, I would appreciate it.  It is a survey on Teen drug use.

Tutorial

1.  Log in to Google Apps and select your "Drive" option at the top.

2.  Click the "Create" button and then select the "Form" option.

3.  If you haven't used "Google Forms" before then you might get this splash page to appear.  Just click the "Get Started" button.

4.  Now you will see a window pop open that asks what template you want your form to be in.  Just select one that goes with your theme.

5.  Give your survey a title and enter a description for it.

6.  Now you can start adding your survey questions to your form.  The "Question Title" is where you would add your individual questions.  I haven't ever used the "Help Text" before, but I am assuming this would be information that would help your respondents know more about the question.

7.  There are many question types that you can use for your survey.  Just click the "Question Type" drop down box to get a list of questions you can use.

8.  The "Text" question type will allow your respondents to type in their individual answers.

9.  The "Paragraph Text" type allows users to enter much more information in paragraph form.

10.  The "Multiple choice" option gives your survey users the ability to pick from just a couple to several options.  Users can only pick one of the choices.

11.  The "Checkboxes" question type will allow users to select more than one option from a list of choices.

12.  The "Scale" lets you set up a question that can be rated.  I haven't had occasion to use this question type but it looks promising if I ever need people to rate something like a product or an activity.

13.  The "Grid" type would allow you to create an array of questions.  Play with it and see what I mean.  This is a great question type to use if you have several answers to just a single question.

14.  Once you are done with your question decide whether you want it to be required or not and then click the "Done" button.

15.  You can also have "Section" headers and "Page Breaks" as part of your survey.  This will allow you to break up a long survey into smaller blocks so that you don't have a continuous run of a page and your users don't have one endless scroll.

16.  On your option question types you can also choose "Other" so that your users can respond to a choice that you might not have listed.

17.  Now you can reorder your questions by left clicking, hold, and then drag your questions up and down until you get them in an order that is logical.

18.  Once you are all done with creating your survey click the "Responses" and make sure the "Accepting responses" option is checked so that people can now respond to your survey.  Also from this menu you can view your responses and other options.

19.  The last step is to share your form out to the world so that people can start taking your survey.  Click the "Send form" button found at the top right corner of your screen.

20.  You can easily share to your Google +, facebook, twitter, email, or just copy and paste the "Link to share" somewhere where others can view it such as your blog or website.

Learn Math and English Language concepts using Learnzillion.

I found this great site today called Learnzillion.  They have done a great job creating animated video tutorials in the subjects of Math and English from grades two to twelve.  They only have about 2000 videos now, but the potential with what they are trying to achieve is huge.  If Learnzillion continues creating easy and comprehensive videos for teachers and students to use in the classroom, then they will become a great resource for those students who are struggling with math and English.  In fact they are recruiting 200 more teachers this summer to create videos for more of the Common Core standards.

Tutorial

1.  Go to www.learnzillion.com and create an account; its free.

2.  At the top you will see the different tabs that can go to.  You can just go out and explore the different lessons or you can find them by the Common Core standard.  You can even create a list of favorites.  

3.  Click on the "Classes" tab if you want to create a class and enroll students.  The advantage of creating a class and adding students is that your students can get an Enrollment Code which will give them easy access to the sites content.

4.  If you click on the "Explore lessons" tab you can go straight to the videos themselves.  Decide whether to view Math or ELA content by clicking on the respective tabs.

5.  Now choose the grade level that you are teaching so that your movie selections are narrowed down a little bit.

6.  The drop down box under "Domains" will give you the different sections of the subject that are available.  Remember that after this summer they should have quite a few more completed.  To actually go straight to a Common Core standard just select the "Choose a standard" drop down box.

7.  Off to the right you should see videos that related to the grade level, domain, and standard.  Just click on the "Core Lesson" box and this will take you to the actual lesson that contains the video.

8.  Dead center is your video.  Just click on it to get it to play.  NOTE:  I tried to use Google Chrome first and the video wouldn't play.  Using Internet Explorer worked best for the entire site.  Now off to the right you can actually download the slides that teach the lesson for some offline viewing.  The Coach's commentary will let you watch a short video as to how the lesson presenter goes about teaching the specific lesson.  The Guided practice section is awesome, because it contains a video with multiple examples of the lesson.

9.  Off to the left of the main lesson video you can see the related videos that contain more content about this particular lesson and standard.