Introduction

Ask the class how could you gather information about our class?  Well it depends what we want to know! We might be able to gather some information visually (just by looking at people), some other things we'd need to ask people. We could go to each person one-by-one, or hand out lots of questionnaires to them, but that is a slow way to do it and ends up with lots of information on lots of sheets of paper that someone needs to look through or gather together.

 

In this lesson we'll be taking a look at another of the great apps in Office 365: Microsoft Forms. This allows for the creation of online surveys and quizzes, and is a brilliant way to gather data quickly and efficiently, and then see powerful insights into what has been collected afterwards. There are so many different uses for Forms, but we'll be starting fairly simple in this lesson to gather some basic data about our classmates that we'll be able to use in the next lesson.

 

Put the students into pairs. They will work in these pairs for the next two lessons.

 

Help with Microsoft Forms

You can find Microsoft's help and guidance on using Forms HERE.

 

 

 

Creating your first form

The students can work at one computer or side-by-side on their own machines. Ask them to log in to their 365 account and open Forms.

 

Then ask JUST ONE OF THE PAIR to click New Form.

 

 

As soon as the new Form opens, ask the student that made the form to click Share in the top right of the form and choose Share to collaborate. 

 

 

Change the permissions of the form to Specific people in my organisation can view and edit.

 

 

They can then add their partner's email address to add them as an editor. Both students will then be able to work on the form and it will be saved in both of their OneDrives (it will appear in 'Shared' for partner number 2).

 

 

Give your questionnaire a title and a short privacy statement in the description box. If we are collecting people's data we should be honest and respectful about what we are going to do with that data. We should not ask any questions that someone might be uncomfortable answering.

 

 

Add the first question with + Add new.  The first thing we want to know today is who is completing the form, so we're just going to call the first question 'Name' and make it a text question. We've also flicked the switch to make it a required question, which means people will have to give an answer before they can submit the form. 

 

 

Now we can add out next question. Click the + Add new button.

 

Add another question. We'll make this one about birthdays and make it a choice questions. Forms has some clever features that will sometimes really help speed up your work. In this case, as we added the question about when your birthday is, it has provided us with suggested answers.

 

 

You can pick which suggested answers to use, or ignore them and add your own options manually, but in this case, we do want to use all the months so we'll click 'Add all'. We're not going to make this a required question. We'd prefer it if people did answer it, but it gives them the chance to leave the question out if they'd rather not share that information about their family.

 

 

Ask the students to continue adding more questions so they have the Name question, plus four other questions about their classmates. Favourites are a good option to use as most people are happy to share that information. Encourage them to use multiple choice options for their questions. Remind them to think about whether it should be 'required' or not, based upon how personal the question is.

 

Here are some more examples we used, but you can choose your own.

 

 

Style your Form

Click on the Theme button at the top of the page to style your form.

 

 

You can make simple colour changes to the background or choose one of the illustrated themes. You can also customise your theme with the + sign where you can add your own background or colour.

 

 

 

Form settings

The three dots in the top right of the screen allow you to access the form settings

 

 

Here you find a number of choices such as who can complete your form and when it can be completed. It can sometimes be useful to change the 'who'  to Anyone with the link, this is good for when you want to send your form to a wider audience of people that wont have a 365 account linked to your organisation. 

 

 

Sending out your Form

Finally, on the form editing page, click Share.

 

This gives you a number of options for how to send your form out to people, but in this lesson we're just going to use the email option.

 

 

As you click this, your email account should automatically open and an email containing a link to complete the form should be generated. All the students need to do is add the email addresses of about ten people in the class, and you, the teacher. It's suggested that they add the next ten people sitting to their right, so everyone gets sent a form. Remind them to be careful with spelling and using the correct email address when sending the form. They should ask people or their teacher if they are unsure of an address. 

When the addresses are added they can click the Send button. 

Then give the class some time to check their email inbox where they should find the different forms that people have sent them. They should open the email, open the form and complete the questions, being sure to click submit at the end.

 

Viewing responses

Once people have submitted their answers you can see all their responses back in the form. At the top of the page, click on Responses (the number shows how many people have completed your form so far).

 

 

This page gives a summary of responses or graph for each question, depending on what the question asked. The students will need to come back to this data in the next lesson.

 

 

Plenary

Recap and review the students' understanding of the lesson with the following questions:

• What have we created today?
• What advantages does an electronic form have over a paper based form?
• What is privacy? 
• How did we consider people's privacy today? 
• What is collaboration?

Explain that in the next lesson they will be using the information they collected in their form to make a collaborative presentation.