Google Forms and Flubaroo - Fantastic Formative Assessment

This term I have been using Google Forms as a way to formatively assess student learning and help form next steps for learning.  For those of you unfamiliar with Google forms it is essentially an online survey that you can edit, adapt and craft into almost any form you like.  The results are then collated in a Google Sheet (spreadsheet).

I had been playing around with conditional formatting to help highlight areas of need and next steps for learning.  It worked but was time consuming and fiddly.  Then I discovered Flubaroo.  This awesome little add-on for Google Sheets will automatically mark, grade and analyse student responses for you.  There are times where you may need to adjust student spelling for their answers to register as being correct but this is simple to do and doesn't take much time.  Flubaroo also identifies questions that the class as a whole didn't do well on giving you easy next steps.

Sample of a 'Grades' sheet after Flubaroo has worked its magic. 

Flubaroo also allows you to weight questions, with more important questions getting more points than support questions.

So if you are using Google forms for quizzes or low stake assessments then give Flubaroo a go.  It's a handy little tool that just might make your life a little easier.

The Importance of Community

It's been really busy lately with camp and end of year testing and I have been a bit slack with my blog posts lately.

Camp was an amazing experience, seeing students challenged and achieving things that they normally wouldn't have the chance to do.  But something that really stood out for me on this camp was how amazing our parents are.  They are such a valuable resource that schools do not use to full advantage.

The parents we had on camp were amazing and sitting and listening to them talk about their views on schools and what is important was very insightful.  As educators we often are so caught up in our little corner of the world that we forget that we speak a different language to most.  Parents have the power to bring us back down to earth and realise that the lives of our students are so much more than what we see at school and what they tell us about.

Involving parents effectively is more about listening to their point of view and linking their skills and values to the school rather than trying to get them to listen to the schools values and convincing them to believe everything your teachers believe.  This will never happen and you don't want it to either!  I read a really great article recently on Leading Volunteers by Dan Rockwell.  It is more aimed at non-profit organisation but it has some great ideas that can be leveraged into the education setting.

No organisation will ever grow to its full potential if it is full of people who are the same.  Everything I have been reading and hearing about 21st century learning, teaching, business and life revolves around having diverse teams working well together on collaborative and creative projects.  We can achieve this with our school communities too!

On camp I was really impressed with how engaged the parents were in educational issues and how well they could talk about what they wanted to see in our school.  Then I was really disappointed... in myself and in our school.  How many times have we failed to tap into this amazing resource?  How can we do a better job of getting face time with our parents to get them involved and supporting what we are doing?  How do we get some of the amazing parents into school helping out as positive role models for our students?

I don't have the answers to these questions but I know that it will take more that one meet the principal meeting a term or the odd Google Form survey to get real engagement.  It is going to take every teacher, the admin team and school governance to value what our community can bring and time to listen and be engaged with the community for change to happen.

Finding an answer to these questions is going to become increasingly important as schools try to remain relevant in the 21st Century.  I can see that we are going to need to re-invigorate the idea that the school is the heart of the community and make sure that more than just believe this... we need to live it.