Sunday, April 21, 2013

Week 4: Google Apps


In class last week, Torrey gave a presentation on Google Apps. Although I was already familiar with Google Docs (or Drive), I had never used Google Forms before. It was quick and easy, and there were some great features for tracking responses. I think that Google Forms would be a great way to have students evaluate their experiences in the course. The teacher could send out mini-evaluations throughout the course (not just at the end) to gauge how students feel about certain content, grammar points, pedagogical methods, or even, various uses of technology. Because it can be anonymous, the teacher may have a better chance of getting honest responses from his/her students in order to adjust the course speed, content, or methods. The one downfall is that Google Forms does not currently allow the direct input of any diacritics. Unless both the teacher and the students are willing to type the text in a word processor, this really limits the use of Google Forms if the language requires any of these special characters. Hopefully, Google will bring back this feature to all of its apps. 

1 comment:

  1. Hi Megan,
    I did find it interesting how Google Forms does not allow you to input special characters. I spent a good amount of time searching for a solution and copy and paste seem to be the only option for now. Google Forms can be beneficial for collecting quick data. However, you would have to provide the students with a Google Doc to insert special characters and ask them to paste their answers into the forms. If you don't mind the responses being open-ended, you could always just use the Google Doc and let all students respond to the questions on the document. I'll keep my eye out for any solutions regarding Google Forms and language learning.

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