There are some great books out there on improving teaching practice, pedagogy, history of education, ed policy etc. But sometimes the day to day minutiae can detract from grand plans, and what you really need are tips and systems to improve efficiency:
The problem: You need to find any amount of information from a group of people larger than 5.The pro-tip: Stop emailing. Start using GoogleForms.
It truly amazes me that some teachers/administrators will email a group of 40-50 adults for, say, t-shirt sizes or lunch preferences, or for phone numbers and then manually copy and paste it all into an Excel or Word doc. This is absolute lunacy.
As a rule of thumb, any repetitive action is ripe for a life-hack to increase efficiency.
The much (much, much) easier way to collect data is create a single GoogleForm which will tally all results.
Advantages:
- You can send the forms via email (embedded) no links to click.
- You can standardize the way information is submitted (t-shirt sizes from a drop down menu instead of: L, large, bigger than average etc.)
- With students you can easily see who has submitted so far.
We have used GoogleForms for the mundane, like collecting contact info from team members and students to more creative parent surveys during registration at a community night.
GoogleForms will not only collect everything so it is easily readable and sortable, it will also crate pie charts and graphs based on responses - making it incredible easy to send out top-line data to administrators or team teachers.
Still don't understand, quick video here:
PS - there are 80 more ideas for how to use GoogleForms in the classroom here.
Caveat emptor - this is a part of an occasional series, these are all small ideas, none are earth shattering, but they have been helpful to me. Have other pro tips?Feel free to share in the comments.
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