Technology in Education - Google Form

Hello and welcome back to my blog, hopefully you are doing well. So this is my second entry for my Technology in Education, where I did some review/reflection on updated tools for learning. Ok let’s get to it. For this entry I will chanting about Google form, ok I think everyone has the experience of using Google chrome at least to fill some survey for Phd students, materialistic shopping survey and random feedbacks about an event.

Here is the link to my simple science test which covered 2 chapters in form 2 (Biodiversity and Ecosystem) https://forms.gle/ACdYGhdMQvsvCzF5A

Well little do we know that Google form is multifunctional and can be used for education purpose especially assessment. I started to discover the usage of Google form for education in January 2019. This is because, I was the form 1 science coordinator and if you are familiar which MRSM system each new students need to sit for a pre-test for classifying and evaluating their knowledge in science. As we all know, every school will produce exam questions and this required the usage of papers.  So, being a biology teacher, I am not favour in using too much paper and end up throw it away because the pre-test is a one off session plus different set of question will be used for next year.

Diagram 1 shows how many students got it right for a question

Hence, I thought of using Google form as an alternative for my students to take the test. So I copied all the exam question in the form. This will reduce the usage of papers and also save money. The advantages of Google form are, teacher does not need to check the answer manually because it is automatically set up in the Google form. So this will save teacher’s time in marking. Moreover, Google form is really suitable for objective questions since it is just simple tick and check. The best part about Google form is easy to use and understand plus the layout is simple and does not have too much fancy designs. Less fancy design is important for a test because not to distract students from the main purpose.

Diagram 2 shows individual marks and each response for question 

Furthermore, we can add colourful pictures in Google Form which is something that very expensive if we wanted to produce color printed test. This is very good to enhance student’s ability in understanding the question and getting better result. However, in real exam we cannot have a color pictures so the result obtained might not reflecting students understanding but I do not think it will affect the majority of students, only a few special cases.

Google form is reusable and students can redo the questions as many as they wanted. Moreover, the questions order can be reshuffle so this can prevent students from cheating or copying their friends answer.

Diagram 3 shows a disadvantage of Google form which for structured question the word need to be exactly the same otherwise it will be consider wrong

However, the downside of Google form is it only suitable for objective question but not the long structured question. The efficacy of automatic checker is applicable only for objective, so teacher still need to manually check the structured or long answer question on the screen. This is not really good because it will cause eye fatigue and damaged our eyesight.  Another downside, is the school must possess good computer and internet infrastructure to execute Google form. For example, if we wanted to do a test for 100 students which is impossible for a school to have 100 working computers at the same time, teachers need to do it by class and quarantine other class in order to prevent cheating.

I think that’s all for today, see you in another entry about Plickers