Here’s a third party application that works with Google Forms for added form functionality. One feature that is missing from creating forms is the ability to have viewers upload a file. This is where Forms+ comes in. Tied to your Google account, you can create a form from Google Drive by connecting Forms+ to your account so that it appears as one of the applications. Use Forms+ to create your form using these text options: prepended and appended text   well as a regular text box and larger text area (multiple lines). Selections tools include the option for a drop down menu as well as checkboxes and radio buttons. Forms+ also has inline checkboxes and inline radio buttons so these types of questions don’t take up so much screen real estate. But the best feature is the ability to add a question type where viewers can upload a file. Files that are uploaded are automatically added to your response spreadsheet as well as a new folder in Google Drive.

If you create a form for individual assignments and included a file upload option, all of the assignments uploaded would automatically go into a unique Google Drive folder. How cool is that!

When I first read about this application, I assumed that it wouldn’t work with our UA Google Applications, but it does!

Now for the drawbacks. If you use Form+ to create a form, you don’t get all of the features that you do in Google Forms. For example, there are no themes to distinguish your form from one another. You just get a default form look which is basic and lives on a web page that is populated with Forms+ advertising. On one of the forms I created, I got advertising from backcountry.com featuring a sale on underwear (of which I recently purchased) and the header was from cardstore.com of which probably fit best with an online greeting card service that I use.

Another pretty big difference is in the responses spreadsheet. When you create a form using Form+ you do get an automatic spreadsheet created for collecting the responses but it is missing the Form menu. The big drawback of this omission is that you can’t get a graphical representation of the summary of results. For some form-use, this is critical feature.

Missing from Form+

• themes
• scale, grid, date and time question types
• adding section headers
• inserting image or video
• branching
• automatic authentication for UA user ids
• form menu from responses spreadsheet

All of your forms create dwith Form+ go into the same Form+ folder.   You can fix this by adding folders if you use Forms+ for multiple classes or projects.

As the following video suggests, there is a work around for using the File upload option from Form+ and adding it to   your regular Google Form but it is pretty clunky and might not work for every type of user.

Possible Solution:

• create your form in Google From
• create a single question in using Form+ that has a file upload question. Save the form and copy the form URL.
• in your original Google Form, create a section header telling the user to go to the additional site by clicking on the URL to upload their file. A new feature to Google Forms creates clickable links from any full URL added in a form so you don’t have to worry about adding html coding.

It might look something like this:

So you get an idea of the possible difficulties with this solution: making sure users submit the original form AND go to the link to upload a file on a separate form. Another downside is that with two forms you get two spreadsheets and it might be very hard to align the responses on the Google Form submission with the file upload Form+ without very specific directions.

Here’s a video tutorial to get you started:

There is a lot of potential here…I’ll be keeping an eye out for more on file uploads in Google Forms!