Collecting Observations of Learning using Google Forms

Compiling observations of students' learning is difficult: lots of loose paper, sticky notes, checklists, portfolios and examples of student work, notebooks, trying to remember things, pictures ... and it gets even more difficult when you teach Ontario Kindergarten and are in a teacher/ECE partnership (as well as planning time teachers, educational assistants, student support teachers, and everyone else who educates our littles).

I used to have a binder with notes and copies of assessments for each child. I will still do this, especially for copies of assessments (phonemic awareness, phonics, PRIME math, oral language screeners, etc.). However, my notes were taking forever to copy over into each child's section and collecting information from other educators didn't happen to its fullest (or at all).

I decided to play around with Google Forms, especially after hearing how some Junior/Intermediate teachers in my school have been using it to track IEP goals.

I opened Google Drive (using my school account). Because I have things on there from studies and inquiries, I created a new folder; this year's folder is "2019-2020 School Year Documentation." After, I created a new Google Form and titled it "Ford Grade 1D Observations" (I'm Mrs. Ford, our class is Grade 1, section D (we have 4 Grade 1 rooms)).

Create a Google Form.

Now, you can start adding your questions. You can have several types of answers: multiple choice (when you need one answer), checkboxes (when you may need a few options as an answer), dropdown (good for space-saving, similar to multiple choice), short answer, long answer, date, etc..

Here is an example of a multiple choice answer format.

You can have your form as complex or as simple as you want - but keep in mind that you (and others) will be inputting information. I try and keep things as simple as possible - with only the need-to-know information.

Click here to add questions.

Questions I had when I taught Kindergarten:

1. Educator (Who are you?) - drop-down answer
2. Date of Observation - date answer
3. Student Name(s) - checkboxes answer with a list of all student names
4. Program Frame(s) - checkboxes answer with the names of each frame
5. Observation of Learning - long answer

Questions I have now as I teach Grade 1:

1. Who are you? - dropdown list of all educators in the room
2. Area of the curriculum - checkbox answers include Learning Skills
3. Student name(s) - checkbox list of student names
4. Observation notes (incl. level of work, if applicable) - long answer

Once you've finalized your form's answers and formatting, you can add answers; click the eye (preview). You can also send this directly to everyone you want to input information into the form.

You can now input information.

You'll want to eventually see the form's results, so open your form again and click Responses at the top (next to Questions). You can scroll down and gain lots of very valuable information, including:

• how much participants are contributing to observations of learning
• how many observations have been made for each student (no more surprises!)
• how many observations have been made for each frame

Click the little green box that will say, "view responses in sheets" when you hover over it. A pop-up will come after you click it, and go ahead with the default of creating a new sheet.

Click this to view a Google Sheet (spreadsheet) with your results from all data that's been input.

A beautiful spreadsheet will appear, but you'll quickly notice that it isn't useable because it's all jumbled up and it isn't sorted by student name (which you will need to do for reporting purposes). I did learn how to further have Google sort this into a Google Doc file for each student, but it stopped working for me halfway through - and a quick Google search showed that many people have this issue for no apparent reason (so I dropped it!).

You will need to apply a filter using student names. I've attached a video below to walk you through it. Instead of looking for state names, you'll be filtering for student names. Once you filter for a student name, you'll be able to view a spreadsheet for only that student's observations of learning!

You can then sort that student's spreadsheet by the date of the observation. I like to have them in order (especially in Kindergarten) so I can show growth over time. This is especially important if you have multiple people inputting observations as the dates of observation will be jumbled (as the spreadhseet will list, by default, from the date the observations were put into the form).

After applying the filter and sorting by observation date, I chose to print each child's sheet. I liked to highlight and add notes and scribbles, cross things out and add checkmarks as I wrote reports.

I chose to print my Google Forms after filtering by student name and sorting by observation date.

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I will soon be updating this blog post to show how to organize photos using Google Keep.