Make a Clicker System with Google Forms in 5 minutes!

March 6, 2017 Bryan

Use Google Forms as a clicker system to get student data quickly with questions on paper or simply posed by the teacher in a live classroom setting. A clicker system is a term for getting student responses and summary data quickly. Using this method, you don’t need to tediously type in questions or add images. You can simply use a generic question to collect student responses and display summary data to drive your discussion of the questions.

Here’s how to do it.

Create a new Google Form. Alice Keeler likes to do this by typing in forms.google.com/create.
Create a title for your form such as “Clicker Answer Form”
Type in a multiple choice question and make it REQUIRED. Remember, the actual questions and answer choices are given to the students on paper, or posed by you.
Go to the gear icon in the top-right corner.
Select the following settings. Select “Limit students to 1 response” so they can’t add additional responses that may invalidate the class summary data that you get from the students. Select “Edit after submit” so that after you are done analyzing one question with your students, they can simply go back to the same multiple choice question and change their answer for the next question. Finally, click “SAVE”.
After students answer the question, go to your responses.
You now have a class summary of the students’ answer choices that you can display to your students on a projection screen so that you can discuss the results with them.
For the next question, students simply click “Edit your response” and change their answer.
Optional: Add a paragraph question that asks students to explain WHY they chose their answer. If a lot of students get the question wrong, you can scroll down the “RESPONSES” section (shown above) to see WHY students chose the wrong answer so you can discuss and correct their misconceptions, faulty logic, or incorrect recall. Don’t make this question required since you may not use it for each question you pose to the students. Also, notice the form doesn’t ask for names so students won’t know the origin of each response.
Optional: Use the paragraph question to collect student responses to an open-ended question. For example, you could ask “What were some causes of the Revolutionary War?” You can read through student responses to get an idea of what they know.
Attach your Google Form to a Google Classroom post using the Drive icon OR click the “SEND” button in the top-right corner and copy-and-paste the URL to a class website, blog post, email message, or LMS (Learning Management System) to share with the students.
NOTE: If you ever need to delete all student responses from your form, simply go to the 3 vertical dots in the top-right corner of the “RESPONSES” section and go down to “Delete all responses”. You DO NOT need to do this after each student response.