Guest Post: Emily is a senior at Emory University, majoring in Business and Biology. This summer, she worked as an intern on the Google Apps for Education team and here she shares her thoughts on using Google forms on campus.
During the hectic first few weeks back at school – which can be the busiest time of year for a college student – one of the things that helps me get things done and stay organized is Google forms. I started using this functionality a lot during my summer internship to survey the intern community and other groups across the company. It’s an easy and efficient way to obtain and interpret information from many people and that’s why I’m excited to use it now that I’m back at school.
Google forms allows me to quickly create a survey with various information gathering formats (multiple choice, free answer, check box, and more). Then I can simply send a link for the published form to the desired respondents and their answers automatically feed into a spreadsheet in Google Docs.
For example, I recently used Google forms for a club I’m involved in called Goizueta International Network, an organization that helps incoming and outgoing exchange students make the most of their abroad experiences. Google forms allowed me to survey the international exchange students about what activities they would be interested in for the upcoming year.
All the international students are from different countries and live all across campus, so creating a survey using Forms was a convenient and universally understandable way to get information. Plus I was able to spice up the appearance of the survey with a new Google form theme.
After collecting all of the responses, I could easily view the results of my data. All I had to do was go to the “Form” tab in the spreadsheet housing all of the survey information and select “Show summary of responses.” This produced the data in a simple, clear graphical format making the data easy to use.
Check out the responses to the question “I am interested in the Goizueta International Network organizing the following...”
We’ve decided to focus on the ideas that had the most support. We know they will benefit and excite both local and foreign students because they all participated in the decision process.
Google forms can be useful in any area of a college student’s life. It can classify and coordinate information for classes, clubs, athletic teams, fraternities or sororities, friends, family, or any group or organization. As a Google Student Ambassador I plan to educate more people on my campus about how Google forms (along with the rest of the Docs and Apps suite) can make all their activities run more quickly and easily.
Without putting in too much effort, we got a solid response rate and now have some great ideas for next year.
