I teach 2nd grade. I send home a family letter/survey for parents to complete every year (and am doing the same this year). I keep the completed surveys near my parent communication logs in a binder so I can reference them when I communicate with parents throughout the year. So having a paper copy is important to me.

However, I want to make things easier for my families…so in addition to the paper copies I’m sending out, I’m letting them know they can opt to complete the google form on my class website. The catch is this: how do I gather the data from the form in a way that’s useful to me? The excel or summary options won’t be useful to me at all.

Here is my form: http://tinyurl.com/26xdg5s.

So…
Is there a better way to do this? I guess it’d be easy to upload a word document, have them fill it out, then attach it to an email, but I was hoping for something more streamlined.

How can I (somewhat) easily manipulate the excel spreadsheet that holds the google answers to get a full piece of paper on each student?

They’ve got some intro videos designed specifically for teachers, so it’s a start.

Doug, no one accuses the Common Craft videos of gatekeeping. We need (essentially) Common Craft videos targeted at education. We need better evangelism. The status quo (telling people to just “dive in”) will result in the same proportion of teachers abstaining from intimidating classroom technology and the same proportion of edutechnologists huffing indignantly that teachers are abstaining from intimidating classroom technology.

1. A gatekeeper – someone who says what’s ‘best practice’.
2. Homogeneity – what’s good for the US isn’t good for the UK, and so on.

The best method isn’t to provide everything that someone needs. That way they just feel like they’re ‘catching up’. The best way is to get them to dive in – not necessarily to Twitter, but certainly to experience the firehose somewhere online… :-)