My first thought was to use Google forms as a way to survey parents about their child’s learning and how we can best support them as a school. I created a survey using a variety of response choices; a linear scale, checkboxes, short answer, and paragraph so that hopefully I can elicit a variety of responses. I want to determine how we’re doing in the new Hybrid in-person/distance learning model and what we can do to improve the experience for our students. This information will also be helpful for me in completing a draft of our School Plan for Student Achievement due later this month.
It also happens to be open enrollment month, and as a magnet school part of our program is to reach out and recruit new families to our school. Generally, we host information nights and school tours in person. We set up dates and distribute flyers and post them on our website. But this year, with our restricted ability to gather, we are creating virtual tours for prospective parents to learn more about our program. I’ve created a Google Form for parents to sign up for a virtual tour. I’ve also included some additional questions to get a little more information about their child that we normally wouldn’t have ahead of time. This will be helpful not only for tracking who our target families are, but also for how to prepare to meet their needs if they choose our school. I can see so many uses of this kind of sign-up capability for school events, curriculum nights, volunteer opportunities, etc.
The one area that I hadn’t considered was using Google forms for professional learning opportunities for our teaching team. In Matt Miller’s “25 Practical Ways to Use Google Forms”, he mentions that they can be used to share ideas about a topic or idea and then the results can be shared with everyone. One of things we do often as a team, is reflect on our practice together or share our thoughts about an article or presentation. We usually do this the old fashioned way with sticky notes and chart paper. I love the idea of having a way to not only see everyone’s comments over time but to create an archive of our work that we can refer back to as needed.
Which brings me to thoughts about my capstone project. I am still in the very early stages of thinking about collecting data, but since my end users are teachers, I will be able to use Google forms in similar ways perhaps to pre-assess where the teachers are with respect to my driving question. Then, depending on the tool or product that I develop, I could solicit feedback using Google forms or create a survey about the effectiveness of the tool. Since my area of focus, student agency, may be difficult to measure, I’m guessing that I will be trying to gather mostly qualitative data to support my project. I can see the importance of using a tool like Google forms to organize and analyze the information gathered to be able to draw accurate conclusions.