Fourth graders at Holladay Elementary have been learning how to collect, organize, display, and interpret data from a variety of graphs (SOL4.14), so today students in Ms. Tonello’s class used the new Google forms to collect data. I’ve taught similar lessons in the past, but since then Google has added some cool new features. You can now add photos to each individual answer choice, you can mark answer choices correct or incorrect (for grading purposes), and there are new ways to explore your data. We tried out a couple of these features today. First, the students came up with topics they were interested in for collecting data. Since it’s the day after Halloween, many students chose topics relating to that. Next they signed into their Google drives and created a new form (click Create > New Form). They typed a title and a question for their classmates to answer. Some students added photos for each answer choice (click the photo icon). We published our forms and posted the links to Google classroom (click the Preview button to get the link). After the students responded to each others’ forms, they clicked “Responses” on their own form templates. This showed a quick pie chart of the results, but Ms. Tonello wanted them to create bar graphs, so we clicked the green button at the top to export the data to a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet doesn’t automatically tally the number of votes for each answer choice, so the students had to do that calculation. Then they highlighted the tallies, clicked the graph button, and created a bar graph of their results. Google Sheets has a new “Explore” button in the bottom right corner that lets you explore your data in a variety of ways. We didn’t get that far, but you can take a look at their forms here.
