Monday, June 9, 2014

Simplify School Elections with Google Forms/Sheets!

For those that have explored the Google Forms, you know how powerful a tool it can be. You also know how easy ti is to create one and use it to collect information for people. For those of you that are not familiar with Google Forms, it is basically a tool that allows you to create an information gathering tool much like what you use to fill in information on a website to shop or register.

You choose the questions that are asked, and then you share the form by either emailing it, sharing on a social media outlet, or even posting a link to it on your website. As people fill out the form, the data will automatically appear on a spreadsheet. 

Here are a few ideas for Forms:

1) Use it to collect data for surveys or statistics projects. (Great for Mean, Median, and Mode!)

2) Use it to gather contact information from parents or students.

3) Use it to create quizzes or tests that can then be auto-graded using a free add on. (Click the link to see how!)

4) Or use it as a tool to gather votes for your school wide class elections. (Which is the subject of this post.)

Here is the Class Election Template I have made, and used successfully for the last two school elections. It has a link on it that you can use to get to the balloting form you will use to gather the votes. Just follow the directions on the sheet and it will guide you through the process. It is really easy, and will only take a few minutes.

Once you are done, you will have a ballot you can share via a website or email that students can use to vote. It is designed to be used with Google Apps users, so as long as your students have Gmail accounts it will capture their student login info. This makes it easy to spot duplicate votes.

Once you copy the Voting Results sheet from the template to your results spreadsheet, you will be able to watch the votes as the come in for each candidate, and instantly know what the numbers are.