Gen-Ee-OUS

Made a great trip to google docs to save myself a lot of time this fall when, hopefully, I'll be wanting a lot of contact information from students. In the past, I've just had students write down their info on papers and had to do manual data entry. Rather, my better half has done the data entry.

But as we all know, data entry bites the big one, especially with students who can't write their name clearly, let alone their email address. So now, I've created a simple web form with the Forms option in Google Docs' Spreadsheet which will ask students for their addresses, phones, and emails, etc.

The information will populate in the spreadsheet automatically, which I'll be able to access anywhere (even from my phone). It is seriously sweet when I can load up this spreadsheet, hit a student's number, and dial that person right away.


So now, I can just give students a ten-minute filling-out-a-contact-info-form assignment that they complete on the internet. No data entry, no trying to read chicken-scratch, no sorting pieces of paper, no wasting trees. Google Docs adds a time-stamp to each submission, so I'll know whether students completed the assignment on time. The results are sortable and searchable, so I can pull up all the students in a certain class, or search for a particular student.

Combine this with the upcoming Google Voice, and I can even give kids a number to reach me on my cell, or send a text message with driving directions to my madrigal group.