A powerful assessment suite: Google Classroom, Forms and Flubaroo

Ask any student the following question and see what they suggest: 

"What happens when you know that the ability to do something exists, but you don't know how to do it?" 

Chances are, they're going to tell you, "Google it!" or "Look it up on YouTube!"

It's true... want to change out the alternator in your car? There's a video for that. Need to know the genealogical classification of the saber-tooth tiger? Google knows.

Learning some creative ways to put together classroom assessments is no different. I have some experience with Google Forms as an assessment tool (and have used them very successfully in the past for self-assessment surveys). Forms are easy to create and can be tailored to anything from simple quizzes to elaborate and dynamic evaluation tools with embedded links, videos and more. Over the past year or so, I've heard teachers rave about the possibilities out there for pairing Google Forms with an assignment in Google Classroom. Bring in the Google Sheets add-on Flubaroo, which will compile results, grade answers, and return feedback to students, and you have a powerful suite of assessment tools.

This is where "Mr. Google" comes in. My knowledge of how to make Forms/Classroom/Flubaroo work for me ended at colleagues suggesting, "this is so cool you have to try it!!" and then leaving me to fend for myself. So, a quick search led me to this tutorial by Google user Eric Curts, which was the "Goldilocks" of instructions for me... its "just right" format gave me exactly what I needed to know: not so much to be nauseating and not too little to leave me hungry for more. For those who like to watch a video before tackling a project like this, links are provided. Flubaroo has a great user guide as well and its use really was pretty intuitive, especially because I had some previous introductions to Forms and the data spreadsheets that are generated with the results.

I'm sure that what you really want to know is, "how long will it take me to master this technology?" Well, here's a timeline of my morning:

8:05 am - Decided to use Google Forms to make a quick reading quiz / entrance ticket for today's 2nd period class. It took me less than 10 minutes to copy/paste questions and answers from our online teachers' manual into Google Forms. If you're doing this for the first time, plan on spending half an hour or so learning the features here.

8:13 am - Googled "grading online assessments with google forms" because I couldn't even remember the name of the Flubaroo add-on. The first link just happened to be perfect (thanks, Mr. Google and Mr. Curts!).

8:16 am - Completed the quiz with my own correct answers so I could make the answer key, per instructions in the tutorial. Installed Flubaroo add-on in the spreadsheet that was created with my first quiz "result" (which was really from myself).

8:20 am - Created an assignment in Google Classroom and attached the Google Form so that I could push the quiz out to all my students.

8:22 am - Finished up some last-minute questions for the assignment students would work on after they did their quiz. I also linked this assignment to Google Classroom.

8:35 am - Got to the computer lab and was ready to go for my 2nd period class.

8:42 am - Students arrived to class, signed on to Google Classroom, clicked the quiz link (which I set to automatically collect their email addresses) and took the quiz. Submitting quiz results automatically marked the assignment as "Done" in Classroom, and gave me a preliminary overview of the class' progress (if you haven't seen the "responses" side of Forms it's really cool with some slick pie charts). Students could begin their next digital assignment at their own pace, and I was free to monitor those who took a little longer on the quiz.

After class was over, it took me no more than five minutes to go into the response spreadsheet, make a few clicks of the Flubaroo add on (just like the tutorial explained), and immediately get a report of the graded results. One more click and these results were pushed out to students via email.

Here's a screenshot of what the Flubaroo sheet looks like (I blacked out the user names). Notice that the rows in red indicate low-scoring students: 

When it comes to Google products like Classroom and Forms, I really have found that "the Internet knows all." Sometimes we might wish that this weren't true, but in this case we as educators really should take a cue from our students. If you know that the possibility is out there, just give it a quick search and see what you can find. The best way to learn a new technology is to try it out for yourself!

New Year... Newsletter Time

How often do you communicate home to families, just to share news from your classroom or aspects of your curriculum? I don't do this nearly enough, though I'm not sure why. It's certainly good practice, and our elementary teachers do a great job of connecting weekly. So, since it's a new year it's a good time to look at some ways to make more (or more significant) connections with families.

Last year, I used an online digital newsletter format from Smore.com. I liked the ease of creating layouts and adding content. It was super simple to use and creates a sharp-looking product without a ton of effort. I've used it with students, too, to lend a "digital publishing" flavor to a more traditional brochure-type project (this one happened to be about NYS landscape regions for Earth Science). You can email your flyer (limited to 200 emails monthly) or embed it into a blog or website.



What I don't like about Smore is that you are limited to saving 5 flyers with a free account. You can always just alter and re-send an old flyer, but it's nice to be able to store your old creations to come back to. This makes it a bit prohibitive when using it for student projects, as well.

This year, I decided to use newsletter time as an opportunity to try out a new app that I downloaded but have not had the chance to use: Adobe Slate. The app is available on multiple platforms and as a website as well. Adobe Slate allows you to create a newsletter that takes on the form of a photo story. Since it is so intuitive to use and can be accessed across platforms, I think it could be a powerful publishing tool for students to use. It requires signing up for a free Adobe account (don't let students connect via Facebook!) but does not limit the number of newsletters. The fact that it syncs projects between your device and the website made it particularly easy for me to insert photos and content, as well as edit from multiple locations. Like Smore, Slate allows for dissemination via embedding, sharing a link or emailing directly. Emailing opens your default inbox so if you already have an email group set up it's a snap to send it to families.



I'm procrastinating, so this year's newsletter is not quite done. I need to finish a few classes and add the resource links that made last year's more powerful and useful for families. I will say that I think the Slate layout is going to look pretty nifty, but I'm not sure that it's all that necessary for a newsletter. Next time I need to pay more attention to photo-documenting cool experiences in class so that I have better pictures to use.

The benefit (and potential classroom application) to Slate is that I could see myself using it to make tutorials for my students. I appreciate those teachers who have flipped classrooms and make videos, but it's not something I ever see myself doing. I have, however, made documents for students in the past that instruct them in some sort of "how-to" (here's a recent example about how to join a Quizlet class).  I frequently use screenshots or labeled photos (even my own photos of class handouts that I can then digitally label). Anything that I could put in a video, I could put in Slate. There are some great examples of how others are using Slate right on their website (including several that would be useful for educators).

How do you communicate and connect with families? How often? Have you explored any neat digital options? More importantly, do you have any tips about making sure that newsletters actually get read?