One thing I felt was lacking from the office 365 suite of software for education was a forms option. So I am REALLY excited to see the Office forms preview that has been released in the last month or so. I really missed (and still used) google forms, which provided a quick and easy way to formatively assess students and easily get the data in a summary which was useful to see how much of the class had grasped key skills or ideas. The Office Survey option was a little clunky to use but good for end of topic/end of year reflections from students. I also use Kahoot in class and our students love it and the graph at the end of each question does give a good summary. But you can’t use Kahoot for students written answers, it is always multichoice and this is where I am most excited for the new addition to the Office 365 family, Office Forms. Office forms is very similar to the google forms in layout (I hope as they roll it out fully there are some options to pretty it up a little with some different colours etc) but for a 365 school you can use your students log ins to get the analytics to link data back to specific students if you wish. The home page looks just like sway. I can’t wait to use it once classes start again after out Autumn holidays.
The basic set up is quite simple
Head along to forms.office.com and register. This might take a few days but it is worth the wait 🙂
once you log in, it is pretty obvious how to make a new form….
So once you have clicked new, you get a screen like this, where you can add your title etc
The you have the different options for questions – options/choice, or longer answer or ratings.
You can chose the options, allow multiple answers etc… and once you have your questions you can re order them by dragging them round…
Once you have written your questions, you have multiple options for sharing – the QR code is a cute option for maybe having a quiz for each station round a room…. and you can see at the bottom you have the option to have a sign in or not
Once students/staff/whoever have completed the form, you can then click the responses tab to see a summary of the data. You can also export to an excel spreadsheet if you wish.
So the charts give you a quick glimpse, and you can use the data is excel to get the longer answers. I’d probably mail merge them into a word document so I can easily look over them or provide feedback if I need to
Another nice feature was that you can preview your form for a computer or a phone
So for a preview version there are a LOT of awesome features in Office Forms. It is simple to use, flexible enough and I am sure as they continue to develop there will be even more awesome features. I have been WAITING for something like this to come along and thus far it has ticked all my boxes. So the next task is to make some up for my classes and see how they go when we get back to school in a week.
ibpossum takes on tech 