Creating Google Forms

Have you ever taken a survey online before and wondered how it was created? Have you ever wanted to create a survey but don't know where to start? Well, Google Forms is your answer! Its free, easy to use, and provides great feedback from your users. Check out some quick step directions on creating forms below.

Lets get started:

• Go to Google Drive and log into your google account.
• Click on New (if you're using the updated version of drive, if not click on create).
• Then choose Forms.

**With the updated version of form you can totally customize your design, we'll go over that later, just start with naming it! 

• After its named you have check boxes for specific settings for your form like who can access it and how the questions appear. Click settings that apply.

Now its time to create some questions

• Question types range from multiple choice, check box, text box, and many more. I like to pick my type first, then write the question and any supporting help text. 
• After that, fill in the possible answers if applicable. Depended on the question type you pick, you may have additional advanced settings. Theres a checkbox in your question that allows you to require the question when users are filling it out.
• When you are done with the question you can either click on Add item to add additional questions or click on Done.
• When you are done entering questions you can look at your questions and re-order, duplicate, or delete as needed just by hovering over each question. If everything looks good its time time to play with the theme!

Thanks to the latest update to Google Froms (OCT 2014) you can now fully customize your form!

• Click on the Change theme button up top to get to all the great customizing options! I love the bold graphics! Every detail can be customized to your liking ranging from header image to text font and color

Sharing:

• When you're ready to share your form click on the Send form button and you will get lots of options for embedding, emailing and posting your form. You can even add collaborators to work on the form with you!

Here is a picture example of a form I created

Google Summer Updates

I am always excited to read about new updates coming to Google, but even more excited when I get to experience them. Here are few new updates that have come to Google this summer that you can try out:

Google Docs now has quick access links

 While signed into your google account (for faster access) type:

• google.com/docs
• google.com/sheets or  sheets.google.com
• google.com/slides  or  slides.google.com
• These links will take you directly to those specific programs. This access route gives you a much more colorful and creative view. You can easily sort through that specific file type and create additional files. When performing a search, it will also only search that file type, narrowing down your search to specifically what you are looking for. By clicking on the  Menu icon on the left, options appear to go to the other programs or back to your original drive.

Suggested Edits in Docs

This is a great new addition currently featured in the Docs extension. With this option, you can allow anyone with comment or edit rights to make suggestions to your document. The user can highlight text and make changes such as replacing text or changing the font and those suggestions will show up in a comment box to the right of the doc. As the owner of the doc, you can then choose to accept or deny their suggestions, by clicking on the check mark or the x,  as well as leave a reply comment.

 This is a perfect tool for editing student work. See my example below. 



  


Last but not least, a Google Slides app for mobile devices!!!

(Coming soon for iOS devices, currently on andriod)

This should solve all your classroom problems when trying to work on Google Slides on multiple mobile devices! 

for android: check it out here

and if you haven't already, you can download the sheets app for both android and iOS

Great new feature for Google Docs----Google Add-ons

If you haven't already recognized, in Google Docs and Sheets, they have created a tab called Add On's. In this tab you can add on special features for Google docs such as clip art, bibliography creator, mail merge and more.....  
To access, click on the add-ons tab and then go to  get add-ons. From there, it will take to you the Google add-ons collection.  Here you can browse suggested add-ons or sort in the top left corner for a more specific selection. Clicking on the add-on will give you detailed information on what the add-on does. It will also tell you if it is free or paid. You can find all your add-ons in the add-ons menu tab once they have been added to your account. From that menu, you can select which add-on to use, or  manage options (which allows you more functions of the add-on and the option to delete it.)


Try searching for something called "open clipart". Once added you can search for free open source clip art in your Google doc.

Another favorite of mine is Merge by MailChimp, which allows you to create email mail merges based on a Google Sheets document. Super quick and easy to use! 

Check out this great video by Google explaining more about add-ons :

Helpful links: 

http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2014/03/add-ons.html

http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2013/12/newsheets.html