I wrote and gave a Google Forms test today

And it went very well actually. Google Forms.

Some of the kids had a hard time with the submit button. They didn't intuitively know to click it when they were done. I'll admit that seems a bit odd to me, but . . .

Some things I learned along the way:

• I had to add a place for the students to put their name in at the top. I should have had a first name and a last name box for sorting on the spreadsheet.


• I should have also had a box for them to indicate their class. Easily fixable on the spreadsheet, but I could have taken care of it up front.


• I had 10 multiple choice question with the last one being a free response. s


• The google spreadsheet is a little awkward to deal with, but it easily downloads to excel which is easier.


• My questions were all on the top row. Some were pretty complex, so they took up a lot of room. I cut those and put them on the second page of the spreadsheet.


• I made the key on the first row of the spreadsheet. This helped with grading.


• I added a column after the name for grade.


• As I graded, I put wrong answers in red. I like red. Kids aren't going to see this and it stands out nicely. This also gives me a great visual looking down the column as to which objectives are strong and weak.


• Some of the kids turned in multiple copies. It was obvious some just kept hitting the submit button, because each was identical. But it was interesting on some to see a progression of correct answers. However, one that turned in several had completely random answers each time. So I learned something about what that one knows too.


• I had kept the free response pretty simple - just to get them used to it and for me to see what they could do. It was a word problem and I asked them to tell me about one (and only one) step. A few did just that. Most gave the answer instead. Some however worked the entire problem in the same way we've been working word problems in class. It was interesting to see how how clever they could get representing model drawing in a text box.

One of the drawbacks I found in writing this test is that Google Forms does not have the ability to link. So, I couldn't insert an image in a problem nor could I link to an associated page of images. That's a bummer.