On a couple of occasions this past course development cycle, there was a need for a mechanism for students to sign-up for a required element in the course: giving a presentation during a specific week and committing to a synchronous chat session on a scheduled date. An important outcome of having students signing up is to be able to manipulate the received data. Instructors needed to see the big picture so they can send confirmation back to students. Some options for accomplishing this included:

Email: in both courses, the instructor did not want to manage this information by having students send an email.

Bb Quiz: creating a one-question quiz within blackboard didn’t seem efficient because it would have been hard to collect the data.

Bb Discussion: again, collecting the data didn’t see very easy.

Bb Group: you can create self-enroll groups and have students enroll in specific groups that you set up. Again though, you would have to use the group discussion or group email to get the information. This would result in multiple clicks for students and would have been hard to determine a second choice.

Ah ha…Google Forms

We created a couple of questions using the form feature. Question types allowed us to ask for text answers as well as questions that had student choose from a list.

The form is submitted and the data is collected in a spreadsheet.

When you create a form you are given the embed code so it is easy to embed the code into a Blackboard item. (1)Select Embed under More Actions and (2) copy and paste the embed code into blackboard.

Once the spreadsheet is created (which is automatic once you save a form) the document is shared with the instructor.

In one class, the spreadsheet was actually embedded in blackboard (but hidden from students) for easy access. (1) Under Share, select Publish as web page, (2) In this case there was only one sheet, the other option was to share entire spreadsheet, (3) select HTML to embed in a page. This gives you the wrapper needed for embedding. and (4) copy the code.

Go to your blackboard course and create a new item. (1) select the HTML Source Mode icon, (2) paste the embed code you just copied from the spreadsheet.

When you toggle off the HTML Source Mode icon you won’t yet see the results…

…until you click on submit