Friday 30 October 2015

Spelling Tests with Google Forms

If you watch young children playing school, the highlight of the game is when marking has to be done. In reality this is not the case. Marking can be an arduous task for any teacher. Most marking requires the skill of a teacher as many questions can be interpreted in a number of ways which means that there can be a number of different but correct answers. Spelling, however, is not one of these tasks. In a spelling test the word is either spelled correctly or incorrectly. I have always maintained that a computer could mark spelling tests... and now they can and they do.  

Introducing Google Forms! I love Google Forms. Since I started using Google Forms in June 2015, I have not had to mark any spelling tests by hand. As I teach all three classes in each of the three grades I teach - that translates to 78 spelling tests that I do not have to mark each time I set a spelling test in a grade. Work smarter not harder, is what I always say!


What does the process involve? Firstly I set out the test in Google Forms. I then customise it with my own header image, font and colours. 


I answer the test on the live form which generates a memo. I enable the "Flubaroo" Add-on which ensures that each submission is marked and an email is sent with the results to the boy's St Peter's email address. Each time a boy answers the test his submissions are recorded on a Responses Spreadsheet. This spreadsheet gives me a breakdown of each boy's answers as well as his overall mark. I can also see the low scoring questions and the average. It is essential that auto-capitalisation, auto-correction, spell check and predictive text is turned off when completing the tests. 


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