Microsoft Forms and Quizzes

Using Microsoft Forms to create easy and accessible Homework

Forms is one of many powerful tools included in the Office 365 package which teachers from most institutions will have access for free. It's a simple website that allows you to create quizzes or polls with a number of different customization options.

Before making a piece of work to be given to students, it is important that a quiz is created and not a form. If a form is chosen, you cannot assign any points or right/wrong answers. Forms can be used as surveys and are not graded.

Forms facilitates a few different types of questions. Each time you wish to add a question, you will need to press the 'add new' button on the lower left side of the interface. The most obvious and easy to set up is the 'Choice' question - the multiple-choice question. Here is a breakdown of how some of these work.

Choice

1 - The top box is used to write your question.

2 - The boxes below the title are used to put your multiple-choice answers.

3 - Hovering over the right-hand side of the answers will give you the opportunity to delete a particular answer or allocating the correct answer by clicking the tick.

4 - This button lets you increase the number of answers you'd like available.

5 - This number denotes the weighting of this particular question. These can differ which means that easier questions and harder questions can have different weightings.

6 - By clicking this bar, it enables the question to have multiple correct answers. This option is useful but has its limitations when it comes to marking the quizzes easily. Avoid this option if it's your first quiz.

7 - If this bar is clicked then this question has to be answered before a student can hand in the quiz.

Text - Short Answer

1 - Correct answers to the question are shown here. Students will have to spell it correctly in order for the mark to be given automatically.

2 - If there are multiple answers (or spellings) to your question, you can add more answers by pressing this button.

Text - Long Answer

1 - For long answer questions, you won't be able to provide an answer. You will need to manually check every answer in order to assign the marks awarded. These are great to check deep understanding but are time-consuming when it comes to marking.

2 - You must click this bar the change it to a 'long-answer' question rather than a 'short-answer' question. Both types of questions are accessed by initially choosing the 'Text' type of question.

Ranking

1 - When writing in the list of answers, you will have to put them in the correct order or 'ranking'. When students receive this question, the answers will be in a random order (not the correct one you have set).

2 - It's an idea to explain a bit more about the ordering in the question. Help your students understand what the top and/or the bottom of the order represents.

Rating

1 - You can choose a range of 2 - 10 levels and either numbers or stars for the symbol. It's important to specify what each number means.

2 - The points given for this question have been set to 0 because this is just to gauge how the students have felt after undertaking this.

Now that you have created a quiz for your students, it's time to share or assign it to them. Click the big 'Share' button in the top right of the page. A link is automatically generated and you can copy this to hand out to your students. You could even shorten this link to make it easier for you to include the link in textbooks for example. It also gives you the option to generate a QR code, embed, or send in an email. The most efficient way to distribute any quizzes is through Microsoft Teams. Teams is also included in the Office 365 package with Forms. I hope to create a post about Teams in the future to help you set up individual teams and share any work with your students.

I hope these brief descriptions help you to understand some of the great features within Forms, to create the perfect quiz for your students.

YouTube Playlist

Create a YouTube Playlist of relevant content for your classes

I have a Youtube Playlist for all of my classes. It's an easy way of collecting videos and grouping them in one handy playlist so that your students can watch them in an order that you decide. It's easy to set up but you will have to create a YouTube account if you haven't already done so.

Firstly, you're going to want to find the first video to include in your playlist. If you already know what video you want to include then go ahead and find it. If you don't, type in some keywords and watch some of them. It's really important that you watch a video the whole way through before putting it on a playlist. You don't want to use a video that too deep into a subject than what the students have learned, as this can cause confusion.

Once you've found your video, find the 'Save' button underneath the video player. Click it, then click 'Create a new playlist', give your playlist a name and finally press 'create'. That's it! You've made a playlist!

You can add as many videos as you'd like to your playlists, but it's a good idea to keep them concise and relevant as to not overwhelm your students. The next time you find a video that you think is suitable, click on 'Save', then click the playlist you'd like to add it to. For the purposes of this video, I'm creating a playlist about the heart so I have named my playlist 'The Heart'.

Once you're happy with the videos you've added, you can double-check your playlist by navigating to your profile. If you've not changed your profile picture, it will be the first letter of your first name in a circle. Once in your profile, there is a tab called 'Playlists', and your new playlist should show up here. Navigate to your new playlist and then click 'view full playlist' underneath it.

Here you can rename your playlist, rearrange the order, give it a description and even share it. You can even change the privacy of this playlist. If you'd like this playlist to only be visible for students in your classes, then you can change the privacy from 'Public' to 'Unlisted'. This means the playlist can't be searched for and can only be accessed by people who have the link. By sharing this playlist, you are creating a link for the recipients to follow.

You could even turn the website address into a QR code or shorten the link.

Hope this helps!

QR Codes

Using QR Codes throughout your Worksheets and Workbooks 

In this blog post, I'm going to hopefully show you the power of a simple QR code. I'm sure you've seen these 'barcode' things everywhere. On posters, on leaflets and maybe on some schemes of work. These 'barcodes' are to be scanned by cameras to take the user to the desired website address (among other things). QR codes can be a very powerful tool if a series of videos or articles are required in order for students to complete a homework task. All the user needs to do is to aim the camera of a device with an internet connection so that the QR code is in the centre of the screen. Depending on your device, a pop-up notification or something similar may appear, to which you will need to press in order to follow it to the desired location.

There are many free websites out there that offer this service but they will usually try and get you to sign up to their paid subscriptions. For the purposes of this post, I'm using https://www.qr-code-generator.com/. To create your very own unique QR code you will need the URL (or the whole website address. Let's say my Physics class has just finished a module on the features of waves and I'm setting a worksheet to help them revise for an end of unit test. On this revision sheet, I'd like to include a link to a useful website (BBC Bitesize) that includes some handy videos and quizzes. I will have to copy the website URL and paste it where the QR code generator tells us to. A QR code will shortly appear on the side. You may either download the QR code as a picture, or you can right-click on the QR code and then press 'save as'.

There's nothing else to it! It's as simple as that. Now you can copy the image and insert it into any sort of document you'd like.

I encourage you to have a go at generating your own QR code and to think of some ways your students would appreciate this simple tool. Hope this is helpful.

Link Shortening

Shorten URLs to Place on Worksheets and within Workbooks

When handing out pieces of work with any sort links to external videos and/or websites, long links can be an issue. If these long links are printed, its obviously very time consuming to type some addresses out and easy to make mistakes. Link shorteners turn the potentially huge links, into smaller easy-to-use links. There are a few examples of sites that do this for you but I'm only going to show one. My go-to is bitly.com for its ease and the fact that it has a free version.

If I wanted to assign a piece of homework for pupils to watch a video then answer some questions on that video, then I should supply them with a link. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to link a video about generating electricity. The standard link is as follows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20Vb6hlLQSg&t=31s. As you can see it would be a nightmare for students to type out. If we go to our link shortener and copy our original link in:

After pressing shorten, a new shortened version of the link is given which works exactly the same as the original one.

Now you have a better link (https://bit.ly/2RnBDxJ) to hand out on any physical worksheets.

Go ahead and try it for yourself!

Another thing to add is that you can create an account where it stores all your shortened links and it will supply you with statistics of how many people have been using the link.

I hope this helps somewhat!

Welcome!

Hello there! My name is Torrey and I'm a Physics teacher here in Wales and I thought I'd start a blog to put together some tips and ideas for using technology to get more out of your lessons. Being in lockdown has made me realise how busy we are as teachers. I'd like to be able to come out of lockdown with a blog to share some ideas I have for using technology to aid learning in and out of our classrooms.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you have any ideas you'd like me to cover!

Torrey