Teaching involves a lot of data collection that happens almost daily. As a teacher or an educator, you want to track and assess your students’ performances, create surveys and polls, do quizzes, and so many other functions that require gathering data. Thankfully, Google Forms can help you automate the process and lessen the burden.
But even if you use Google Forms, collecting data can be tiring, especially if you have to repeat the process of creating new forms every time. This is where Google Forms templates come in handy. With predesigned forms, your work is a lot faster. It is like copying and pasting each time you need to collect data from students. Using templates means there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
What are Google Forms?
Simply put, Google Forms is a web-based program that builds easy data collection forms for multiple purposes. Teachers (and students as well), can share the forms with respondents via a link or embedding it in a blog post or web page. Google Forms are not limited to the education industry only. Just about anyone or organization can use it to gather data. Although it is a free tool from Google, it is nonetheless a powerful and excellent app.
In this post, I’ll share seven indispensable Google Forms templates that can ease your data collection task as an online educator. But first, what other compelling reasons are there for using Google Forms, besides automating your work?
Reasons to Use Google Forms in Your Online Teaching
- Asking different types of questions: Google Forms lets you ask both open and closed-ended questions designed in multiple formats. You can present your questions as multiple-choice, drop-down-menu, short answer text box, rating scales, and checklist.
- Meeting curriculum objectives by creating surveys: Google Forms can help students meet the requirement of developing research questions or questionnaires to meet curriculum objectives.
- Create professional-looking forms: Your form doesn’t have to be dull and boring. Google Forms give you room to unleash your creativity. You can apply preset themes or designs to your forms to give them a professional look. There are many templates in Google Forms to change the appearance of your forms, including adding any photo as a page background, customizing texts and headers. You can even add animated header images.
- Ability to control data entry through validation: You can apply various validation options to ensure that respondents enter correct or useful data. Setting a question to “Required,” for example, prevents your students from skipping it. Entries for some responses can be set to allow only text, number, a range, or a specific character count. With the validation option in Google Forms, you are sure of collecting quality data.
- Various ways of administering forms: With Google Forms, you can collect data using several methods. You can create a link that allows students to respond to questions using a form on the web. A form can be built into an email that lets recipients submit responses through their inbox. You can also embed code into a blog that gathers specific data.
Recommended Google Forms Templates
Now that you’ve seen why these tools are excellent for your online teaching, let’s consider seven great Google Forms templates specifically suited for educational purposes. The good thing about templates is that you don’t have to worry about what questions to ask because Google has done all the hard work for you.
The Template Gallery in Google offers several excellent time-saving preset forms for teachers who want to use Google Forms. All you need to do is decide on which Google Forms templates to use and add or modify a few questions to suit your purpose and voila! You are good to go.
Quick Tip: Students need to be familiar with navigating and answering questions online. For this reason, it is an excellent idea to always provide online quizzes and homework in similar formats. Templates make this possible.
Accessing any of these Google Forms templates is pretty straightforward. First, go to the Template Gallery and search for the predesigned form you want to use.
- Assessment
This is the template to use if you need to create quizzes for your students. It makes assessments easy.
- Contact Information
The Contact Information template is perfect for collecting personal information of students, parents, or guardians.
- Course Evaluation
No matter how superb your teaching methods are, feedback from students can help you evaluate and improve your performance. A good template for collecting honest feedback from respondents is the Course Evaluation form.
- Event Registration
When planning a school event, this is the perfect template for creating fillable forms that you can send to your invitees (parents, guardians, and other guests).
- Event Feedback
After an event, it is an excellent idea to gather feedback from participants regarding the event. Doing so will help you to know what areas need improvement and what you can do differently. The Event Feedback form is a great tool for accomplishing this task. The template is related to the Event Registration form, so when you organize an event, make sure to get this one ready to send out to students and other participants.
- Exit Ticket
This form is excellent for creating quick formative assessments that you can share with students at different times, such as at the end of a lesson. You can edit the Exit Ticket template to include links, images, and even videos to give your students a richer multimedia experience. If you add a video in the form, you can ask questions such as “What was your favorite part of the video and why?” and “What new thing did you learn from watching the video?”
- Worksheet
If you need to create a fillable worksheet for your students, this customizable template is the tool you need.
Forms from Google are just one of the many free resources that can take your online teaching to the next level. With more students learning remotely, you can take advantage of several web tools, including a helpful Google forms template (most of them free) for teaching from home.
