Pop quiz

Friday, May 30, 2008 11:11 AM

Posted by: Garnet Gratton

Garnet Gratton is an educator with experience teaching university-level literature and writing courses. She has also taught high school, 9th through 12th grades, in both public and private settings. Now, she teaches and consults other educators through her @edu blog, which is where we first encountered her story.

Ever since I discovered Google Docs' forms, I must confess that I’m obsessed. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about all I can do with forms: grading and testing and quizzing and polls and information collection and books-read-this-month and surveys and sign-ups. . . . It goes on and on until I fear my head may split.

To put an end to the madness, I picked one option, put fingertips to keyboard and came up with a simple quiz on rhetoric:

You can send this quiz to each of your students through email, but it's even easier to make it public, and link to it from your website. Have them enter responses from the computer lab, or assign it for homework. Google docs timestamps students' entries, so you'll know if they beat your deadline, and their responses are collected into a Google docs spreadsheet, which you can check at any time.

One of the great things about this system is that you as the teacher have the option to keep the spreadsheet private, or make it public, allowing students to compare their answers with others. I call this particular quiz a "feeler quiz," in which I can sort of feel out whether students understand the information from a previous lesson, or if the material needs a further going over. Hmmmm. In this case, I think it's the latter!