Google Forms 1

I find Google forms rather exciting! It is a way to collect information from many people and then it does the hard work for you by putting it into an excel type file. I think that when you need something to be done in an office or even in a school where you need everyone's participation and do not have a lot of time to organize everyone's thoughts this is great. However because I did not have that kind of need I found it difficult to come up with questions that I wanted to ask.
I searched a little more and found that if you have an application called Google Apps then you can actually manage who took the survey, who did not, and how many times they took it, because it will collect the email of those who took the survey.

Like many programs and tools I have found that it take a little bit to get used to. I had to play around and try different things in order to get the survey to turn out the way I wanted it to. Linking pages and finding the final button to submit were two of my tasks that took me a while to achieve. Once I was able to master them it became easy to finish the rest of the survey.

This feature can be used in all kinds of ways, it can be hyper linked, it can be embedded, or simply emailed. All of these ways can be beneficial to different users depending on what they wanted to achieve. For example a teacher/principal could send it as an email to survey their co-workers/employees about a certain topic or it could be embedded on the school's website to reach out to the parents of the students.
Another great thing about Google form is that it is created in Google documents so only certain people you decide to share it with will be able to see it or you can publicly share it so that anyone who searches can find it and take the survey as well. As long as you have the link you don't have to be a Google documents user. This means that you can collect data from all types people, even those who are not Google savvy. I can set it to where I am the only one who can make any changes to the document so that the information is as correct as it can be. I decided that to get the maximum results for my survey I wanted to share it publicly and allow people to understand how other people fell about the topic, so follow my link to find out how other people responded.

This tool can serve as a learning tool for the teacher as well as getting parents to interact in the classroom. A simple survey on the progress of the class and what the teacher can do to improve or a survey as to which parents can help in the classroom whether it a day with a guest reader or a holiday party. Both of these thing can contribute to the effectiveness of the teacher in the classroom and self renewal of the teacher allowing the teacher to engage in professional growth and leadership.