Google Forms Basics

What is a Google Form?

Google Forms are a useful way to collect a lot of data at one time, or for information that you know you need to collect often. In education, they are most often used for quizzes and tests, but they can be used for much more than that. There are a large variety of question types, making them very versatile for your needs:

• • Text (paragraph, short answer)

  • Multiple Choice

  • Checkboxes

  • Drop-down

  • Scale

  • Grid

  • File Upload (attach an assignment)

If you want to see a basic Google Form that shows all of these question types, click here.

Google Forms Settings

Google Forms has a variety of settings once you set up the basic structure.

You can set it up to automatically collect email addresses, but I also usually have students enter their first/last names so it is easier to sort the spreadsheet later.

Where do all of the responses go?

Google Forms has two ways to review responses. Go to the "Responses" tab on your editing page. As soon as people start submitting responses to your form, there will be graphs/charts and a summary of text responses on this page. At the top, there will also be a bar showing how many people have responded, a button that lets you stop accepting responses (ex. if it was a quiz and you want them to lose access after that hour is up), and a Google Sheets icon.

When you click the green icon, it can create a Google Sheet for you of all of the responses, and this is where Forms are really powerful!

As you can see, in my first two lines are the two responses I submitted using this form. It timestamps it so you know exactly when the person was working on it, and automatically collects their school email address. Then it displays students' answers to each question in the order they are given on the form. This is a great way to read all of student responses quickly, and you can highlight any column of the table and filter it to see different results, add up scores, etc. More on this later with the Tests/Quizzes page.