Ever had to collect a lot of information from campuses, wanted to do it electronically, but instead ended up with lots of emails flying back and forth with Word or Excel spreadsheet documents attached? And then, someone has to put it all together some way or other? Skip that!

You’ve probably already heard of GoogleDocs and its built-in spreadsheet function. You make a spreadsheet, GoogleDocs takes your column headings and creates a form people can fill out online. When you view the data, it’s already arranged in a spreadsheet. You just send the web page link to the form and people fill it out. It once was incredibly difficult for non-techies to do that, but now it’s very easy — so easy, students all around the world are learning how to do it.

To facilitate your creation of GoogleDocs for information-gathering, set up a GoogleDocs area just for your district’s use. Campus administrators love it because setting up a spreadsheet is something they know how to do, and turning that into a form people can fill out is a cinch with GoogleDocs. One thing: When dealing with secure, confidential data, you should avoid using GoogleDocs — or any online tool that your district does not host on their own servers. But most of the data campus/district administrators collect is not confidential.

Here’s one example of a district using GoogleDocs (login as guest) to collect information. Note the two videos at the top of the page give an overview of GoogleDocs and how it can be used in K-12 education.

How to get started and what success looks like:
GoogleDocs enables you to turn your new spreadsheet into a web-based form that others can fill out. All data submitted goes straight into your spreadsheet; you can work with it online or export it as an Excel spreadsheet, HTML document, PDF, and so on And you can make the results available to your participants in all those formats!

Example #1 — TechSalaries: What should your tech director be making?

• Respond to Survey
• Results as HTML/web page
• Results as Comma-Delimited format
• Results as OpenDocumentSpreadsheet readable in OpenOffice or NeoOffice
• Results in MS Excel format
• Results in PDF

If you do not want to use Moodle and the Questionnaire Module, consider these 10 alternative online poll/survey sites you can take advantage of, all at no-cost:

• Poll Daddy
• Cool Web Toys
• Vizu.com
• Blogflux
• Quimble
• SurveyMonkey
• Zoomerang
• Survey Gizmo
• Ballot-Box
• Easy Poll

More on GoogleDocs:

This session highlights technology that makes it easy to collect data online and escape the ever-present paper survey.

GoogleDocs is only ONE way to accomplish web-based data collection. Some general suggestions:

• Get a Gmail account first.
• Make a list of all the pieces of information you want to collect in the order you want them to appear.
• If the list is longer than 10-15 items, consider using a different tool. Although you can go up to 26, GoogleDocs starts to get difficult.
• Create a table of the data you want, as shown below:

Short Name (keep this short and unique)	Description	Type
FirstName	Enter the First Name	Text
LastName	Enter the Last Name	Text
Email	Enter Your Email	Text
Question1	Have you ever created a web-based form?	Paragraph Text
Question2	What is Your Favorite color?	Multiple Choice (radio buttons)
Question3	Check all your favorite authors.	Checkboxes
Question4	What district are you at?	Choose from a list
Question5	Rate this workshop on a scale of 1 to 5.	Scale (1-n)

Note that this is what the entry screen looks like for each question on the form:

The form will looks like this on the Web:

Your Results will looks like this:

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You can share the results with others:

Click on SHARE in the top right hand corner and choose SHARE WITH THE WORLD.

And, you can make results easily available:

Part 1 – Get a GoogleDocs Account

Step 1: Sign Up for Gmail Account

http://mail.google.com/mail/signup

To get your own GoogleDocs account going so we can do surveys and forms…

Step 2: Explore GoogleDocs

Part 2 – Working with GoogleDocs

Step 3: Create a Spreadsheet

Step 4: Sharing Your Spreadsheet with Others (Inviting Collaborators or Viewers)

Step 5: Converting Your Spreadsheet into a Form

Step 6: Sharing Your Form with Others

Step 7: Shorten the LONG address Provided by GoogleApps for Your Form Using SnipURL.com

Go to http://snipurl.com and paste in the long address provided by GoogleDocs. Click on SNIP IT and then paste the address (automatically copied to your computer’s clipboard) to your email or whatever document you were going to use to share it.

Step 8: Publish the Results of Your Survey Online

Note that you can publish this in a variety of formats: