I discovered that my local library (St. Albert) has a subscription to LinkedIn-Learning. One of the courses offered is a basic course on Google Forms Essential Training. This technology is a possible solution for a project I am working on – so a free whirlwind tour is a deal I could not pass up! Because I am declaring this course for verifiable professional development, the following are some notes and ‘KEWL’ things learned.

Building on the Obvious

Google forms are straight forward and easy to use. Nevertheless, the following are a few features I never noticed/used until I took the course. The course was broken into three sections, the following notes are from the first section: “1. Build a Form“.

• Question Description: Provides additional prompts to help the user respond.
• Validation: Forms has basic validation on entries. For example, a number is between, greater than or less than a particular value; or that an email contains the character ‘@’.
• Adding Images or Videos: Likely useful for examinations, I have not had cause to use them up until now but good to know they are available!
• Sections: I had not noticed the section concept before but it definitely has potential.
• Sections Based on Answer: An interesting feature available when using sections is the ability to navigate to out of sequence sections based on the answers to a question. For a questionnaire, this would eliminate ‘scroll-fatigue’ on the part of the user.
• Themes and Pre-viewing: the icons on the top allow one to change the colour palette and photo theme for a form. Pretty standard and your works of art can be seen via preview button.
• Templates: Personally, I have found the templates to never quite fit what I was looking for.

Being Responsive

A form ultimately exists to collect responses which was also the name of the second section: “2. Work with Responses“.

• Where Responses Go? One of the powers of the GDrive is the integrated tools such as Google Sheets.
• Gearing for Responses. The gear or settings controls such functions as collecting an email address, sending the respondent a copy of what was submitted, allowing for only one response (per email), edit after submission, and presentation options.
• A Presentable Form: staying with the settings-gear, a progress bar can be added, questions shuffled, provide a link if submission-updates are allowed, and a standard messaged after submissions have been received.
• Quizzing the Form: A final tab in the settings-gear allows the form to be used as a quiz. Points are assigned to the questions for scoring and grading purposes.
• Sharing the Form: A form can be shared through the usual methods (email, link and social media. The form can also be embedded with code generated by the GDrive.
• A Responsive Analysis: Google Sheets and the Google Form app itself provides different ways to analyze the responses. While this works good for a questionnaire, I find these tools are not well suited to analyzing responses to a quiz with different answer types.

Iffy Quizzes, Plugs, and Thank You

The author/moderator of the course, Jess Stratton, included some tips from her course Google Sheets Advanced Tips and Tricks and Google Sites Essential Training (but these are future blogs and courses). One thing Jess may want to do is review the quiz questions used were vague or marginally relevant to the material presented. I suspect these were added by someone else based on a cursory read of the material.

Running at just under 40 minutes, this LinkedIn Learning course provided a good helicopter tour of the technology. While I have a gazillion unanswered questions, at a minimum I know I had not missed anything by simply playing around in the tool. Best of all, at free, it was a great deal for a quick helicopter ride over Google Forms!