FlipCon Session "Managing the Flipped Classroom Using Google Apps"

I recently watched another session from FlipCon 12.  The presenter for this presentation was Andy Schwen (@mrschwen), a teacher from Minnesota.  He's known as the master of google forms (okay, I don't know if that's true, but he should be).  He uses Google forms to create assessments.  While the assessment creation is pretty sweet, that isn't what was so spectacular about what he did.  He created another form that automatically analyzes your student's quizzes.  I'm not talking just grading them - this form gives you a breakdown by question, by student, by class...and probably a bunch of other things I don't even realize yet!

Below is the video he shows of everything you can do with the Google Form he set up...prepare yourself, it is crazy!



I didn't want to blog about something I hadn't tried, so I decided to follow his step by step instructions.  I did everything he listed, but my class list was not showing up on my "assessment form"...frustration ensued, but I read further & he recommended checking out Audrey McLaren's set of directions, she had a more narrative form, so I trudged on & visited her site to try again.


I deleted everything I had done so far, and started from scratch, and yet again my class list did not show up on my assessment form.  Thank the lord for twitter & awesome people on twitter because I messaged Andy Schwen directly & he replied within 5 minutes.  I am constantly amazed at what an amazing tool twitter is, & it frustrates me more & more that teachers aren't utilizing it!  However, I've veered off topic...as it turns out I was following both sets of directions correctly, but I was inputting one small thing wrong.  This will make no sense to any of you at all (unless you've had the same problem as me), but my issue arose when I cut & pasted my class list url & put it into my assessment form.  The original directions said to cut everything in the url from after the work "key="...however I had to copy everything between the "key=" and the "#" at the end of the url...How in the world Andy knew this I have no idea, but he did & I am grateful because now I have a super sweet assessment tool.


The tutorial on how to create the Google forms he uses are on his website: mrschwen.blogspot.com.

So how am I going to use this?  I've been thinking a lot about assessments lately, and truth be told, I don't like them much (I'm talking pencil/paper assessments - not authentic assessments).  I think they have their place, but I would much rather know that students can apply what they've learned.  I would love to go to more to project based learning (including assessments).  As I said, I think assessments have their place, but I think they need to be used the right way (in case you're not sure the right way - they're supposed to be used to GUIDE instruction).  So here is my thought:

I've been toying with the idea of mastery teaching for the past several months, and I know it's something I want to do, but I haven't figured out how to organize it all.  One thought I've been considering is coming up with some quick quizzes for my students to take after they think they have mastered a content expectation, in order for them to move on.  The thought of creating, then grading, then analyzing all that data is a touch overwhelming.  This is where these google forms come into play. If I can get the quizzes created, then all my students have to do is take them, then google analyzes everything for me...yippi!  Creating all those quizzes sounds like a very daunting task, especially since I want to have more than one for each standard.  But like everything else I've been doing in the flipped class, it's going to be a lot of work at first...but the payoff in the end will be awesome!