Mobile forms can strengthen your digital classroom and distance learning

The coronavirus pandemic has drastically changed every aspect of modern life – from the way we communicate and socialize, to how we buy groceries and access healthcare services. These changes, big and small, have had significant consequences for students and educators across the globe. Teachers have been tasked with the incredibly difficult and immensely important responsibility of adapting their lesson plans and student support strategies to a new virtual world. Similarly, students and parents have forgone a traditional school year, adjusting to online learning as best as they can.

The impact of COVID-19 has resulted in the necessity of the ‘digital classroom’, allowing students to continue their education from the safety of their homes. Digital tools, like video conferencing platforms and Cloud storage solutions, have played an important role in supporting virtual learning. 

Digital tools like mobile forms can act as a powerful catalyst for student-teacher collaboration and communication. These digital documents can be created using JPG and PDFs of existing paper forms, as well as templates created by educators within Google Docs, Word, and so much more. These digitized forms can then be equipped with ‘smart’ fields, like Text fields, Image fields, Tables, and multiple-choice options, allowing students to easily enter data in an intuitive, interactive manner. Mobile forms can be easily completed from a phone, tablet, or computer, and once submitted, can be immediately accessed, reviewed, and processed by educators – streamlining assignment collection and grading. 

With the GoFormz Public Forms feature, these digital forms can be easily shared with students, educators, and parent/guardians outside of your account – allowing users to quickly gather information, no matter their location. These shareable mobile forms are especially useful for distance learning, enabling students and teachers to continue to collaborate while maintaining social distancing measures. 

Here are five mobile forms teachers are leveraging within their digital classrooms: 

Homework Assignments

With mobile forms, it’s easy to distribute, collect, and review digital Homework Assignments with students. Your digital Homework Assignments can be easily outfitted with a variety of fields for each unique response type: Text fields for short and long answer questions, Checkbox Groups for multiple choice answers, Image and Sketch fields for visual and drawn responses. Using the Public Forms feature, links to your digital Homework Assignments can be easily shared via email or on a website, allowing students anywhere to access and submit their homework. 

Daily Student Check-Ins

During these uncertain times, it can be important for students to communicate the challenges and stressors of their new learning experience with their teachers and parents. Using mobile forms, teachers can easily provide a digital, Daily Student Check-In, allowing students to clearly communicate their needs. A variety of fields can tailor these Daily Check-Ins to each grade. For example, using Checkbox Groups, teachers can include Likert Scales for students to indicate their stress levels, how they feel about remote learning, and more. Using Text fields, students can express themselves as they please with long and short answers. Once submitted, teachers can easily review student responses, allowing them to act faster if a student indicates they need additional support. 

Reading Logs

Enable students to easily track reading assignments with digital Reading Logs. Using Table fields, book titles, authors, hours read, and descriptions can be easily added and organized. Table fields can even include Automatic Calculations, instantly tallying hours read. Digital reading logs can even host Signature boxes, making it easy to capture a parent or student signature, confirming they completed the reading hours listed. 

Quizzes

Design and share engaging, interactive digital Quizzes with your students learning from home. With Image and Sketch fields, ask students to circle or draw an answer. With Table fields, ask them to provide the definitions for provided vocabulary words. Using Drop Down menus, allow students to select one answer from a collection of options, for simplified multiple-choice questions. Using mobile forms, your digital Quizzes can be customized to meet your grade’s testing needs, while engaging students and inspiring creativity. 

Progress Reports

Easily communicate student needs and accomplishments with students and parents, via digital Progress Reports. With the Public Forms feature, your digital Progress Reports can be configured so that only the parent/guardian Signature and Date of Signature fields are made editable so that parents can easily review their student’s progress. Uneditable, pre-filled Text fields can be used to explain a student’s needs and accomplishments. PDF copies of digital Progress Reports can also be shared with parent/guardians, allowing families to keep a record of their student’s progress. Your digital Progress Reports can even be equipped with Image fields, to include pictures of exceptional work, to help illustrate a student’s unique efforts. 

Improve communication and collaboration with mobile forms

As students transition to remote learning, identifying and addressing their unique needs is paramount. With mobile forms and digital assignments, teachers can significantly simplify communication with students and their families, despite the challenges of distance learning. By leveraging a platform that maintains the look and feel of your original documents, teachers can maintain a sense of normalcy as they lead their digital classroom through uncertain times.

How shareable mobile forms work

Digitizing and sharing your mobile forms with students and their families is easy. Simply upload a PDF or JPG of your form, and then drag-and-drop digital fields onto your form and adjust their properties (how your fields look and behave). Using the Public Forms feature, you can then configure your form to be shared with students and parents, determining what fields you would like to be editable and for how long. A link to your form can then be shared with students via email or by posting the link to a website.