How Do You Use Google Forms Instructionally?

Do you use Google Forms instructionally? If so, I'd appreciate you sharing that information via this Google Form, it will only take a couple of minutes at most. Feel free to share a description of how you're using it, including any links to forms, blog posts, wikis, etc. that demonstrate how you're using it. You can also optionally include your name and email address if you don't mind being contacted by folks having additional questions. (It's possible I'll share this info out at some point beyond my staff, so keep that in mind before clicking submit on the form.)

You can, of course, also leave information in the comments to this post so that everyone can see it as well (although it would be great if you would also add them to the Google Form so I have them in one place). Thanks in advance for anything you're willing to share.

Update: Here are the results.

How Many People in Your Family?

This post is more of just an extended tweet than it is a blog post, but I thought it might be interesting to share.

My daughter had a math assignment where she was supposed to gather data on how many people were in people's families, then graph it and determine things like median, mode, range, maximum and minimum (interestingly, not the mean, although they've done that for other problems - which is probably good since median makes much more sense for this problem). Just for fun I created a quick Google Form and tweeted it out.



The only required question was "How Many People in Your Family?" with some directions on how to define that for this problem, but then I also asked (just because I was curious) two optional questions: your location and your age.

Well, that quick tweet generated 95 responses (so far). Since Abby is at the point where it's still really hands-on with the data and you generate graphs by hand (to get a better understanding of the concept), that was a little more than she needed, so she decided to just use the first thirty-two. Here are her results:










In case you're curious, here are the results for all 95 data points:

The median and the mode were both 4 and the standard deviation was 1.54.

For those of you curious about the ages of the respondents, the mean was 40.37, the median and mode were both 39, and the standard deviation was 10.96. (It might be interesting for someone to do a more randomized survey of educational tweeters to see if anything could be deduced from the results - both age and family size data.) We had responses from all over the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Thailand.

So, nothing profound here, but I just thought it was interesting in several respects. First, how many folks responded to a tweet that obviously was not going to have much benefit for/impact on them. Second, how easy it was to generate data via a tweet and a Google Form (not randomized, I realize, but still interesting). Finally, I found the age and family size of the folks who responded interesting, even if I can't draw any major conclusions from it. (Perhaps: The mostly educational twitterers who follow me and responded to this tweet are typically between the ages of 30 and 50 and have two to five people in their immediate family - not a huge surprise.)

Thanks to everyone that helped Abby with this assignment and, if you have anything more profound you can generate from this, feel free to leave it in the comments.

Zoho Notebook

Via Will Richardson (as well as many others).

Readers outside of my district have undoubtedly already seen this, but I'm reposting it for my folks. I - as well as a couple of other people in my district - have been pushing our district to start exploring options as alternatives to Microsoft Office. It's not that I'm anti-Microsoft Office, but we currently pay somewhere around $56 per year, per machine. (I'm not sure of the exact figure because it's bundled with an anti-virus license fee for a total of $65 per year, per machine.) That includes (I believe) licensing for Windows OS, client access licenses to servers, etc., so it's not just Office. District-wide I'm betting that comes out to over $300,000 per year. When you combine that expense with the - currently - limited collaboration features (at least compared to online options like Google Docs or Zoho), I'm not sure it's the best choice either from a financial standpoint or from a preparing-our-students-for-a-flat-world-global-collaboration-use -and-understand-social-media point of view.

Zoho Notebook is still in alpha stage, and I don't know if it will be free or not (most of their other offerings at the moment are free), but it certainly offers a look at what I think our students should be using now or in the very near future. Whether it's Zoho, or Google (maybe they'll buy Zoho?), or Microsoft or whomever, as broadband access become ubiquitous and online collaboration becomes even more seamless and necessary in a flat world, our students need to be using these tools from the get go.

The demo movie below is 3:10 - I highly recommend you watch it.