Ask a Question on a Page Using Google Forms

Here is an idea . . .

What if you have an embedded video that you would like for your students to watch, but you would like to know that they watched it and understood it. How about adding a question? Of course, you can always have a quiz about it, but what if you could add a question directly to the page that has the video? It is easy to do this by creating and embedding a Google form directly on a page in BlueLine. This is useful when you would like responses from students, but you do not want a gradebook entry, and when you do not want students to leave the page, such as with a branched learning activity. This is a great opportunity for formative assessment. The process is simple, but requires that you have a Google account. Here is an example of a simple form. Students fill in their answer and submit.

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Here's how to do it . . .

If you don't already have a Google account that you would like to use, create one: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441?hl=en. Links to an external site. You can use your Creighton email to create the account, if you prefer.
Go to Google Docs and sign in if you are not already. Select Forms at the top of the screen. https://www.google.com/docs/about Links to an external site.
Links to an external site.Select the Go to Google Forms button from the Personal option.
You will be taken to a page with a number of form templates. The simple blank form works well to embed in the BlueLine page, but you can try others, if you like. Select the Blank (or other) form.
After selecting the form, a new form will appear. Add a title. The description is optional. Type in the question. To the right of the question you will see the option for Multiple choice. from that dropdown, select the type of question you would like to have. In the example above, Paragraph was selected. As you can see there a many options. You can add more questions, images, and even videos. Keeping it simple in the middle of a page is often a good idea.
Once you are finished, select Send in the upper right corner.
From the window that appears, select the angled brackets <>.
A window will appear with the embed HTML code. Select the Copy button to copy the embed code into your computer clipboard.
Return to the page in your course where you would like to add the question. Be sure that you are in edit mode for that page. Select the html edit view (</>) for that page that is located in the lower right area.
If you are not familiar with html, don't panic! This will be pretty easy. Paste the code. It is best to do this at the bottom of the other code (if there is any). You can add other text, etc., before or after it in the rich text editor. The code will look similar to the screenshot below. Note that it is enclosed in iframe brackets.
Once you have pasted the code, return to the regular rich text editor by selecting the html brackets in the lower right corner (</>).
You will see your form on the page. Add any other text or other content you would like to the page and Save it.
You may review the student responses from Google Forms. Return to the form that you created in Google Forms. It should appear under Recent Forms on the Google Forms page. Select it. At the top of the form, select the Responses tab. The number to the right of Responses will identify the number of responses received. From there, you can view the responses as shown in the screenshot below.
If you would like, you may download the responses into a csv file and open them in Excel. Select the three vertical dots in the upper right of the form in Google Forms.
Select Download responses (.csv). That file will be downloaded to the download location on your computer.

TIPs: If you would like to add the form to your page after you have already added other content and you are unfamiliar with html, there is a pretty easy way to do that. Go to the location where you would like for the form to appear and type in a few letters. If you would like to have the form centered on the page, then center those letters. It is best to type those letters in a new paragraph so that you will easily separate the form from other content on the page. Here is an example:

sdk

Remember what the letters or words you typed were. In this case the letters are sdk and they have been centered. When I switch to the html view, this is what I will see:

sdk

The and represent the beginning and end of the paragraph (p for paragraph). The style="text-align: center;" is the code that centers the text. If the text is not centered, then the code would appear like this:

sdk

After copying the embed code from the form to your computer clipboard and switching to the html view for your BlueLine page, locate the word or phrase that you typed in (in this case sdk), select it, and paste the embed code in its place. It should appear like the iframe code above, but will be surrounded by either embed code or embed code. You can paste by right clicking and selecting paste or by using Cmd (command) v on a Mac or Ctrl (control) v on Windows.

Once you've gone to all that work and it appears okay, don't forget to SAVE!

A nice feature for the Google Forms is that if you decide to change the form (questions) in Google Forms, it will automatically update on the course page.

At first, it may appear a little complicated, but it is really quite easy. Try it on a blank unpublished page first and then add it to the page where you would like for it to appear.

If you want to know who submitted each comment, ask the students to type in their name before their answer or add a first question asking them their name.

Didn't work out and it messed up your page?

Suppose that you added the form to your page and it didn't work the way that you would have liked. Unfortunately, you have already saved your page and you don't know how to recover what it once was. There is an easy way to revert to a previous version of a page. This is generally used if you have really messed it up and can't easily fix it.

Go to the page you want to "fix" and click on the three vertical dots to the right of the Edit button. Select View Page History.
A window will appear with Revision History. The latest revision (your last save) will appear at the top.
Select a previous revision. Unless you have saved the page a number of times while working on the form, it is probably the next one on the list. Take a look at the page and if it is where you would like to return, select the Restore this revision link.

This is a good trick to remember for any time you find that your page is "messed up."