As I have mentioned in a previous post, I use Twitter on a daily basis as an excellent way of connecting to other Learning Technologists and educators across the globe. I recalled seeing some tweets around using Google docs to create quizzes.  As someone who is very interested in all matters concerning e-assessment, I decided to look into this.

What I discovered was that it is actually very simple to set up.  You create the quiz using a form template.  You can create multiple choice, multiple response, drop down list questions, along with a couple of others.  There are some limitations, one of the main ones being that you can’t add images, but this may be possible soon as Google is continually updating.

The biggest benefit of creating a quiz with Google docs is that you can record students’ marks (which you can’t do with a lot of other free e-assessment software).  There are a couple of ways of doing this which involve having to create formulas in the spreadsheet, but there is another free tool accessible through Google Docs called Flubaroo, which automates the marking process.

One of the things that the Google forms allows you to do is to embed your quiz into a web page, which makes it easy for your students to access.  you could embed the quiz into one of your module pages in the student portal, or you could embed it into a reusable learning object (RLO) such as Xerte.

I was keen to pursue this avenue as I can see a lot of potential here.  Xerte is easy to use and it is possible to create a neat little teaching resource and you can embed your Google quiz at the end.  I have put an example together and the link can be found below.

https://xerte.plymouth.ac.uk/play.php?template_id=758

I also intend to create training material detailing how to create the quizzes and how to generate reports. This will be available as a downloadable document and a video.

In the meantime, if anyone is interested in finding out more about this, contact Academic Support, Technology & Innovation. asti@plymouth.ac.uk