Over the summer Google enabled short answers on their quiz functions. This is wonderful news. However as with all standardised forms, spelling matters and capitalisation matters! However there are some ways to make things a little easier for students or at least give them a sense of fairplay.
In this example we want a name, so we insist that it contains at least one capital letter [A-Z]
We could also insist that the characters are all lower case using matches and [a-z ]+
Note the space is really important if you want to have more than 1 word.
Perhaps you are concerned about people using dogs rather than dog. In many cases both might be correct. Well you can sort that quickly using a maximum length.
You can also use numbers and this can be a great way to not only test maths questions, but also to give a large range of options with a multiple choice diagram,
For example you can easily ask test questions about this heart with a few simple short answer questions rather than do a dropdown from 1-8 or multiple choice.
If you'd like to do more complex regex expresions there's a great site to help you: https://regexr.com/ Please note that there are dialects, so not all regex you find on the internet will work with Google forms.
19 years ago, we were told we were so lucky because we now had 5 channels on our television. What a glorious day in the UK when we finally had a fifth channel. I remember, because I couldn't get it and so I had just 4 channels. 12 years ago, I felt so privileged because thanks to the power of the Internet I could make a call across the world and NOT pay for it. In fact 19 years ago, I would have needed rather a lot of money to be able to share my lessons the way that I did today.
Today I had a student with a virus. Nothing too serious, but contagious and he had to stay at home. In the old days that would definitely have put pay to any chance of him catching any of his lessons and on top of coming back to school, not quite 100%, (s)he'd have to catch up on a truck load of work that he missed.
However, that's not quite the way it rolls in a 21st century classroom! Thanks to a friend's iPad and his PC at home, he was able to Skype in with video to see my presentation and even interact with me. Then, because the lesson was largely on Google Classroom, he was able to join in and submit work as if he was there.
Then after that we were very lucky to have Eric Cooke from Southampton University come by and because there were people who wanted to be there, but might miss the talk. I naturally, broadcast it to the world using Google Hangouts on Air. I'd like to think it was an event of world-wide importance, but I did it simply because I could and to top it off YouTube even made a copy for me.
It was only as I was walking home, I realized how far the world has come and how much technology has helped us. I took many millions of pounds worth of technology completely for granted and used it pretty much on a whim. I can't imagine the justification that would have had to be made to use that kind of tech in my childhood, but here's the thing... We don't have to, if we want to use Video conferencing to connect people half across a city or half way across the world we can. This is the world that our children live in and the world we as teachers should take full advantage of.
And because I can... Here's the video of Eric Cooke! Great guy with a very provocative and entertaining view of the world!
How can you mark 740 assignments in less than a minute? Can you imagine the MIS system that would be required for this and the many thousands of dollars required? To top it all, you have no budget for this and no server hardware.
Surprisingly, you can actually do it using completely free software! You will need a little programming expertise and a plan to break up the onslaught of data you are about to receive!
Requirements
Here's what you will need to pull it off:
Google Apps - So long as Google Apps are not blocked, then that should be enough.
Internet connection - Unless you have amazing WIFI I would not recommend doing this in the main hall. In our case students were in classrooms, which in most schools puts much less strain on the Internet. If this is likely to be a problem, then you can still achieve rapid results, but it will be limited by the number of students you can get on the Internet at once. It's also perfectly feasible to use 3G, if your students are on mobile phones.
A device each child can have access to - Students can share by taking a turn each, but it will be slower.
How it was done
1. Split up your entries
It is important that you limit each Spreadsheet to about 200 entries for high speed marking. You could split it up by year group or school house. These can be put back together again later, but at an individual teacher level you are likely to only need to see a small number of the entries.
2. Create a Form
Firstly you need to create a Google Form with either multiple choice questions or one word answers. Web of Notes has a nice guide for this.
3. Mark it with Flubaroo (Optional)
If you would like to send an email to the student and have the whole cohort marked, then Flubaroo is a great way to do this. http://www.flubaroo.com/flubaroo-user-guide If you are a classroom teacher marking your own class, then you can stop here, but for the speed we need you will need a faster method.
4. Importing the data
On row 3 use an importrange command. (Row 1 will be used for titles and row 2 for Awesome Table commands.) =importrange("1FCA2NN8RUXIQVtX-3DZIBWDC3COnaMO_z5W91SsyCcc","DP1!A2:W200") You need to import all the information that you are going to process. See the video for a full breakdown of the command.
5. Marking the Data
There are two ways to do it. Either you can fill the form out yourself as the first entrant or you can hard code the answers in. Hard coding is slightly faster, but your code will be reusable if you put the answers in first and it works with Flubaroo.
The first method works like this: I used an if(H$3=H3,1,0) You use the if formula and if the answer is correct you give it 1. If you would like to weight answers you can change the numbers accordingly. H3 = Being the cell where the answer is. The $ means that when you copy and paste it won't move down.
Optional: To make the spreadsheet look more effective I added the isblank command, but it does not have to be used: =if(isblank(H3),"",if(H$3=H3,1,0))
You can also use conditional formatting to see at a glance how students are doing.
6. Creating a front end for the sheet
I used Google Sites to make a Website that broke down the various checkpoints and houses.
One very useful feature of Google Sites is that you can use Insert -> Subpage listing.
For the large Scale study we had 4 checkpoints split across 4 houses. Making 16 individual quizzes in total.
I created a front page and then on each sub-page I copied and pasted the questions. This enables you to display more columns in the page itself.
7. Awesome Table
To display the actual results for individual teachers I used a gadget called Awesome Table. (Which is also the reason I used Google Sites.) This is why we needed to leave rows 2 blank. For each column decide how Awesome Table should handle it:
CategoryFilter
CategoryFilter - Hidden
NoFilter
Hidden
The CategoryFilter enables you to choose which columns teachers can see and what they can filter on.
Number based columns appear as a slider and text based appear as a drop down. (You can select multiple keywords)
8. Roll Out the Forms
Once everything is in place you will be able to roll out your forms, teachers can see the data that they need for their groups, heads of year can see their whole year at a glance and senior management can quickly evaluate all of the data.
To provide a whole school view, you will either need to use several import range commands for a live Spreadsheet view or copy and paste once data collection is finished.
By using this method mentors had immediate access to filtered data via the dashboard on their students and up the ranks, leaders could target students who were likely to need more help.
The Result
I expected it take up to 5 minutes for the data to come rolling in, but I found that data was being delivered significantly faster and in most cases the slowest part of the process was the time taken to load Awesome table. Raw results were coming in less than a second and teachers had access to those results in under 60 seconds.
Piloting it in your school
My advice is to have a go with something low stakes. You can start with something as simple as a quiz that you might do in form time. (Homeroom time). Test if your Internet can handle it and if so you have an amazing opportunity to collect and analyse data in near to real time.
Future enhancements
1. The viewer worked very well for Mac or PC based teachers, but did not work quite as well for iPads. We are looking into how we can address is this.
2. Live charts - Live charts are a possibility, because we found out that each tab is a separate task in Google Sheets.
With thanks to the following people
The amazing teachers and staff at Garden International for making the large scale study such a success.
