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Did you know, Microsoft has a division within its company walls called the Forms team? If you answer is no, then you probably haven’t a clue what the Microsoft Forms team does or how it would benefit you in slightest.
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The Microsoft Forms team is primarily composed of company engineers who seek to create a “go-to resource for summative and formative assessments, surveys and more,” that teachers can use to measure a student’s progress.
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My favorite feature in Forms—Individual responses
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- A brand new feature, based on teacher feedback, is Summary responses, which allows teachers to quickly see class-wide trends. Teachers can also “pop out” and project one of the questions in the summary response to watch the pie charts change in real-time with their students, as answers are submitted. That makes for a visually engaging, real-time experience for students, too.
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- While Summary responses helps teachers see class-wide responses, in today’s classroom teachers also need the ability to capture individual feedback to quickly guide instructional decisions, and more.
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- That’s why the Individual responses option, linked to Summary responses, is an incredibly welcome addition to Forms, and perhaps my favorite feature!
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- As a teacher, I now have the ability to identify individual student mastery, struggles and possible needs with a quick click of a button while still accessing whole-group summative data.
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- And the link between the summative and individual responses is what makes Forms an incredibly valuable tool for educators around the world.
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In Stanner’s write up, she gives a few more hands on examples of how Microsoft’s Forms can help individualize teacher/student interactions. That include the benefits of an “individual response” for teachers as well as students and some ideas on how to use Forms for more summartive and formative data collecting.
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Forms-Individual-Response
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As Forms continues to develop, it seems set to replace the now, seemingly antiquated Excel Survey with a more streamlined experience for educators looking to get more granular data through, well, forms. While attempting to unseat Excel Survey, Forms currently leverages user’s knowledge and familiarity with Excel to gain adoption by allowing educators to download Form responses directly into Excel.
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The Forms team is also seeking advice on which new features to add to Forms and encourages teachers to makes use of the Feedback button during any session to offer ideas or suggestion on development. In the near future, the Forms team would like the service to become its own dedicated app that will include teacher-requested features such as image support, branching and other improvements to quizzes and more in addition to the aforementioned individual response support.
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For more information on Form or the team behind it, either contact them via the Feedback section during a session or head to the Microsoft Office blog to read more.
\n\nFurther reading: Data, Education, Forms, Microsoft, Office 365, Students
