Music classes are big and move fast – one of the biggest enemies of assessment! This is something I really struggled with in my first couple years of teaching until I found my silver bullet – Google Forms! I can easily pick up my iPad and assess as students are in centers, playing instruments, or playing a game. I don’t have to worry about having the right sheet of paper on my clipboard, or having students peek over my shoulder to try and check their mark. Check out how I use Google Forms in my classroom to make assessment a breeze!
Making the Form
You need to decide what information you are collecting in your form. You will also need to decide which fields you are going to make REQUIRED, and which will be OPTIONAL. Your required fields will be the bare minimum – the student’s name, perhaps their class (although I prefer just making a different Form for every class I teach), and the mark they are getting on that assessment. Your optional sections are where you can put more information if you have the time – things like comments, or a more broken down mark for the assessment.
Let’s take a look at an example…
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You can see here that this is an example of one of the Google Forms I use for marking when I am doing Recorder Karate. There are only 3 required sections to fill out: the student’s name, what belt they are testing for, and if they received it or not. At the end of the day, these are the most important things I need to know to be able to assess their progress. So that’s why they’re required!
The second half of the form has some optional sections for me to fill in. I can break down how they played by note accuracy, rhythm accuracy, and tone/technique. I can also write in a comment to refer back to later when I am putting in marks or writing report card comments.
Here’s a look behind the scenes, from the creating screen instead of the filling in screen. You can see the options for each question listed here. If you copy and paste into Google Forms from somewhere where your student’s names are already line by line, it will break them up into separate responses for you!
Using The Results
And here is what it looks like once your grades are exported into Google Sheets. I love that you can export your grades one day, and then export them again the next and it will just add on the new grades to the same Google Sheet. It makes it so much easier to write progress report comments or just to see a general overview of where your class grades are for a certain topic or activity. This is also a great way to keep track of students who have already been assessed for that topic. If you first export the answers to Google Sheets, then go back and delete names from question 1 (or wherever your “name” question is on your form), the names will no longer appear as an option on your form but the marks will be preserved in the Google Sheet. Isn’t that amazing?
**I will note that there are some Chrome extensions that claim to make it possible to delete student names after they’ve been selected once in the form. I have NEVER had any of them work well for me, but that would be a great feature to have!
Why Google Forms?
I’ll be honest that I have always worked at Google schools, so there might be other programs out there that do the same thing. But what I’ve always loved about Google Forms is that a. it’s free and b. outputs the results seamlessly into a Google Sheets that I can use for putting marks into my online gradebook or report card writing at home or at school.
I hope you’re able to use this assessment tip to make your life in the music classroom a little bit easier!
