Google Forms Updated

Google Forms has long been the middle child of Google Documents (now called Drive).  It has been under appreciated, long forgotten, but still a vital member of the Google Apps family.  That is until this week when it got what Google is calling "rebuilt" and "a faster, cleaner, and more collaborative experience."  More information on the release from Google.

Well, I have to say that Google has made significant strides in this new version to satisfy those of us that have used Forms for years.  I have long written about Forms on this blog, but these updates are exciting.  The layout is a lot more user friendly, it auto saves like the rest of the Drive documents, responses can be directed to a totally different spreadsheet , and URLs actively link to websites.  But don't just take my words here on the page as truth, let me show you:

Google Forms is very much updated, but it still leaves a few items to be desired.  For instance, where is the functionality to add in images?  There are scripts out there that assist us in doing it, but isn't it about time Google?  Also, math formulas?  These should be part of a WYSIWYG editor and not limited to text as it currently is.  What about the option to randomize questions?  Add a timer?  Some of these features are still very much needed.

At The FAIR School we have been consistently using Google Forms to collect teacher evaluations, enrollment information, quizzes, and more for years.  Also, don't forget the fact that you can now create a form from a current Google Spreadsheet.  For more information, check out this video from Google.  These updates only make Forms more of a player in the survey universe.  Try out the new version today and let me know your thoughts below.

New Icons in Google Apps & Conditional Formatting

The joy of using Google Apps for Education is that very often updates occur – like weekly.

However, every once in a while I login and notice that something is different and a little off.  Such was the case this week when I noticed that the icons for the Google Documents changed as well as a few of their colors.  In addition to that specific change, there are a few other helpful features Google has added in recently to Documents in particular.  Check out the video below for more information:

For more information on Docs, Sheets, and Slides (Google's new Drive names for Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentation) check out this link to their support page.

In addition, some features of Google Apps for Education are worth repeating.  For instance, in Google Spreadsheets the use of conditional formatting is, I believe, an underutilized tool.  It can filter out responses and color code them with ease.  The only thing the user has to do is set-up the formatting.  Check out the video below on how to do that:

As you can hopefully see there are a number of uses for conditional formatting.  We recently used this at school to track which students had turned in important emergency record paperwork.  The ones that had turned it in received an "x" and their cell background turned green and those that had not turned in their paperwork the cells were blank and the background turned red.  It was very easy for instructors and office staff to quickly scan through the list and pull out those missing information.  The same can be used in a classroom.  With conditional formatting set up staff can quickly look and see how much re-teaching needs to occur or how many students actually understood the concept after watching a video.  A quick visual is always a good idea.

Google Apps for Education continues to amaze me with the power of their suite of apps.  Hopefully these videos have been helpful.  There will be more to come in the future!

The Right Tool Makes a Difference

All the teachers came back two weeks ago and the students last Tuesday.  Saying that work was busy was an understatement!  As a technology director there are always lots of meetings, questions, and concerns as the new year starts, but at the same time it is fun to catch up, see what people have done during the summer while you got things ready at school, and share in the excitement of the new year.

I am really thankful for a wonderful little phrase that runs around The FAIR School like an epidemic: “Let’s make a Doc.”  Yes, they are talking about a Google Document.  We have hundreds, thousands, and maybe even hundreds of thousands of these documents.  As we enter the third year of our time with Google I have to say that I greatly appreciate many of the features of a Google Applications for Education domain user.  One of them is the instantaneous collaboration created by a simple document.  Just two weeks alone we had meeting notes, agendas, shared calendars, teachers updating their websites, and our overall workshop week calendar all hosted in our GAFE domain.  Last week our leadership team was in a meeting planning the open house and we quickly made a document to share with the rest of the staff.  We all pitched in, knew what was going on, and even our assistant principal (who had to step out for a few moments) knew exactly where we were and was on the same page.  It worked out really well and the power of Google docs continues to amaze me on a daily basis.

However, not every idea we try always works out really well.  I remember the first time we sent out a Google Form to participants in our summer school program and we forgot to uncheck the box that says “have respondents login to their domain account to fill out the survey.”  Yeah, that was a bit of a mess.  Everything has a learning curve to it, but sometimes using the right tool truly does make a difference.  It could be a Web 2.0 tool (my favorite right now is an awesome little site called Schoology) or even a great piece of software (SMART Notebook 11 is improved for the Mac), but in a classroom there is a time and a place for every tool.  

It’s kind of like a box of crayons.  If you need to color someone’s hair you might choose a dark or light color depending on your purpose.  There are lots of choices, but ultimately you use the one that makes the most sense for your situation.  For sure, you do not select the blue crayon.

Doesn’t the same kind of thinking apply in our classrooms?  If we want to have students work on a podcast we probably have them use Audacity, GarageBand, or some other recording software.  We do not have them use iMovie.  That is the blue crayon and it is used for something totally different.  We have to pick the right tool for the situation and outcome we desire to see.

Sometimes this idea of the right crayon for the job is lost within the educational field.  Lately I have come across two such examples that just make me scratch my head and wonder, “Why are we using a blue crayon when the brown one is over there and it works just fine?”  

Example One: I was recently out at a high school in Minnesota doing some training and came across this board...at least it looked like a board at first glance.  Check out the video:

Yes, that is a SMART Board.  No joke, and it has Expo markers at the base of it.  Anyone using the wrong crayon here?  Seriously, how many times have I told my teachers, “Don’t write on the board with anything but the markers that come with the board.  No Expo markers, magic markers, pens, etc.”  Does that video make any one else’s head just shake?  Just imagine if that board was being used to its full potential.  What a difference that could make in a classroom! 

Example Two: I was recently part of a discussion where we needed to sign up for groups based on individual preferences.  This was a very interesting experience because the tool we used to sign up was a wiki.  One thing that you should probably know about a wiki, if you don’t already, it only allows one person to edit a page at a time.  That is correct, blue crayon use here.  It was slightly frustrating and annoying to be “stealing the lock” from other people who were putting their names on the same wiki.  There are so many better uses for a wiki than to have people sign-up for their groups and a lot of easier, more initiative tools to have people collaboratively form groups.  The use kind of made me scratch my head and wonder.

As you start off the school year, please consider which color crayon you are using.  Do not force a blue crayon into a brown crayon area.  Brown is for the hair, blue is for the sky.  Furthermore, using pencil and paper works just fine for writing a paper instead of some new, advanced, Web 2.0 tool.  We cannot, and should not, choose to use the tool only because we have this idea that it will be “cooler” or “will lead to more engagement.”  That is not the main goal in education.  We want our students to learn.  The tool comes secondary.  Keep in mind the educational goal first and then choose the tool.  However, make sure you choose a brown crayon instead of a blue one!

Google Docs: Research Pane

Google Apps recently released a new Research Pane to all their users. This first appeared in normal Gmail accounts and has slowly crept into Google Apps users. I noticed it yesterday morning when I logged in to my school account.

This is a great new feature that allows you to research the web, find images, and quotes from inside of a Google Document. Check out this video for more information and classroom applications:

For more information on this new feature check out Google's Blog on this topic titled: "Find Facts and Do Research Inside Google Documents."

Another great source is one of my new favorite blogs, Free Technology For Teachers.  He also has a post and some great screen shots as well titled: "Search the Web Within Your Google Documents."

Way to go Google!  Keep the new features coming.

Pulling Text from a PDF

Last week after hunting high and low for a short story text to read in my English 9 class I discovered a great story, but it was only in a PDF. I wanted to manipulate it a bit and highlight some of the vocabulary and sections that stu

dents should be looking out for. I also wanted to add comprehension questions at the end to launch into our in-class discussion the following day. Long story short I needed to be able to convert the text into text.

Every once in a while I had to do this before, but I had never come up with a good method. Apple claims that with the new version of Snow Leopard that you can do it in Preview. I have tried this a few times and it just doesn’t work the way it is supposed to every time. Plus it only works on some PDFs and not on every one.

After looking for a fool proof solution - and the many software solutions out there that promised this and didn't deliver - I realized that in fact I was looking too far. Google Docs does and did exactly what I was looking for with the “Upload” feature. I have used this before to transfer Word and Pages documents into Google Docs, but never a PDF. Thanks to Google's back end technology it can do the conversion f

rom PDF to text for you quickly and easily.

Here’s how you would do it:

1.) Go to your Gmail account and click on the Docs tab at the top.

2.) Once in Docs you will notice next to your "Create new" drop down there is a button called "Upload." Click on that:

3.) This brings you to an Upload files page. Click the blue text that says "Upload files." Follow the steps to upload your file. This is very similar to attaching a file to an e-mail.

4.) After you attach it you will notice that the page will refresh and it will have your document listed in the box. Upload more documents if you want.

5.) Google uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to complete the transfer. There are however limits and restrictions. For a full outline of those and how OCR works click here.

6.) At the bottom of the page be sure to check the box titled: "Convert text from PDF to Google Documents" so that conversion can happen.

7.) After you click "Start Upload" the document will come back with the files created as a direct URL to your new text Google Document. Click on the link and you will get something that looks like this:

As you will notice there will be the scanned pages above each block of text that came from the PDF. The OCR is not perfect and it will not transfer certain tables and diagrams, but with the text it does a great job. Now that the text is in a Google Document you can edit, manipulate, or even export to a Word Document.

Google Docs saved the day for me and allowed my class to be very productive all within only one file. Most important this technology is free with a Google account. Happy converting!

Google Apps for Education & Forms

Just over a year ago we began a shift from our old email services to Google Applications for Education. At times this shift has been hard and confusing, but once all the nuts and bolts were ironed out everything has worked very smoothly. Key to this process was allowing our staff members try out, implement, and discover all the unique features of Google Apps over last summer. When they returned we pushed them to use Google Sites for their teacher website and Docs for a variety of internal forms and discussions among colleagues. We also used Google Calendar for all those appointments we seem to have each and every day. This transition has gone very well and the success continues to astound me. A few of our innovative uses:

-Conferences: The ease with which instructors now create collaborative documents with each other and then edit them in real time is incredible. This year was the second year that we have used a conference Google Document across the high school to share and schedule conferences for each of our roughly 150 students. The kicker was that we did it all at the same time and in the same document. We even used an online form to have parents electronically submit times when they would like to meet with staff (see the video below for more information).

-Bus Duty: After school we have consistently had a problem dismissing all of our students at one time. There are two tiers of busses and they don’t always all get there are the same time. Google Docs and Drawings came to the rescue and now we have a document that everyone accesses at the same time each day to see which buses have arrived. Then staff across the building can dismiss their students accordingly. It has worked out very well.

-Meeting Notes: We used to e-mail notes about a meeting to one another if someone missed for some reason. This is not the case this year because our meeting notes are being consistently updated in real time between both buildings. This has brought greater collaboration and understanding between individuals and teams. Since we have multiple buildings within our district sometimes we schedule meetings when some individuals that work at both buildings cannot attend - whether for conflicting appointments or the geographic location. Now staff members can virtually participate in a meeting even if they are not physically there by commenting and adding to a Google Document that is updated in real time. Unfortunately they do not hear the audio of the meeting (even though there are other ways outside and inside of Google for doing this), but they can still be part of the meeting. It has been incredibly helpful to have all of our staff members on the same page because everyone can look at the one meeting document. We even have our associate principal adding in thoughts on a high school meeting when she is stuck in another meeting across town.

Those are just a few of the ways that Google Apps has changed the way we run in our school, but probably one of the most unique features has been the additional training around one specific application: Google Forms.

Google Forms operates much like SurveyMonkey, but it is free. Think of anytime when you are trying to get information from a group of people, but you don’t have a quick and easy way to do that. Well, fear no more because there is a simple and easy way to do just that. Watch the short video below for an overview (click on the image):
This was one of the very quick and easy ways that we have used Google Forms within our school. We have also created more complicated registration and application forms - even the one for the application to our school was built using this platform. We had over 1,200 parents apply and it was all handled easily, quickly, and was completely free.

Every time that you create a form it also creates a URL that is publicly viewable by everyone on the Internet that has that link. The permissions can be changed slightly, but in most cases you are going to want everyone to fill it out. That URL you can then post on your website, Facebook out, or even e-mail to everyone that you need or want to take your form.
These forms have completely taken our high school by storm. I have used them for quick comprehension checks and for more intensive exams that have taken the entire hour. Our math teacher is using these (in conjunction with a bit more math in her spreadsheet) to actually have the students take the quiz using the form and then it will grade the student’s quizzes and provide her with their scores. In our world history and upper level English classes students are doing their own self grading of essays using this format. Each and every time our instructors are getting real time, electronic, feedback from our students.

All in all Google Forms has completely revolutionized the way that we get information from parents, students, and their families. However, the best news is that even though this specific app is part of our Google Apps for Education domain it is something that even if you can access. Just login to your Gmail account and click on Documents. Then create a new document and select Form. It is that easy.

Want to know which week this summer is best to plan a vacation for your family? Create a Google Form. Once you start I guarantee that the ideas on how to use them both professionally and personally will not stop.