Tech Support – How may I help?
If there’s one thing I dislike it’s taking up precious class time to do tech support and answer technology questions. It my seem ironic, but for an Instructional Technology Coach and teacher in a paperless classroom, I’m pretty picky about what type of tech I use in class. Don’t get me wrong- at the beginning we spend a ton of time making sure everyone is comfortable with the technology we’ll use every day. If I’m going to sacrifice time in the TL then the technology better be worth it.
At the end of the semester this year in French 102 I decided to do a survey “project.” Students created a survey using Google Forms and then were going to present the results as part of their final. (I was trying to trick them into using the past tense because if you’re going to talk about what people chose, said, wrote, you have to use the past tense. #sneaky) First, I had them create situations in Google Docs (using a template) and I read and gave feedback and then they were actually ready to create the form. We had just finished the conditional so most of their surveys used that. And they were funny. Students had to take five classmates’ surveys and then get five other people to take theirs so they had a total of at least 10 results.
Google Forms sometimes acts weird on mobile devices if they’re created in a GSuite account and you don’t unrestricted it from the domain. And by weird I mean it won’t let you access the form even if you’re signed into the correct account. I just don’t bother restricting any Google Forms for my class anymore- not worth the hassle.
Because students would most likely be using a phone to access their forms, I knew that they would need to know how to do this and I didn’t want to spend any time going over it in class. I also knew that if I just created a screencast they wouldn’t watch it and then I’d still have to answer questions which would make me not happy.
The Hack
I created a screencast showing them what they needed to do, put it in EdPuzzle and every time I wanted them to stop and do something I put a question with two choices:
And then I had a nice little data set of who had followed my directions and who didn’t and everyone’s surveys worked great.
