Technology and Social Media Training for School Nurses Blog Series Post #3 by Kim Webb

Happy Tech Tuesday! Today I would like to talk about Google Forms. Google Forms is a survey creation tool and a fantastic tool to gather information. From getting input from a parent or staff survey to creating an appointment system, it just has a wonderful way of gathering and sorting information. Today I am going to go through how to create a form for staff to submit to you when they want to send down a student.
First, if you don’t have a google account you will need to create one. Instructions on that can be found HERE. Once you have your account set up, you can go to forms.google.com.   Once there, click on “blank” which should be towards the top left of the page.

This will bring you to a page similar to below.

From here you can click on where it says “untitled form” and rename it to something like “Nurse Appointments” or “Visit Schedulings” and then in the description put what the form is to be used for. Below is an example.

Next, you can change the questions in order to get the information you need. There are a lot of question types, but for this exercise, we will just be focused on: Short answer, paragraph and multiple choice. To change the question type, you click on the down arrow that’s next to where it shows the current question type. Google has a smart AI, so if you begin to type out your question, it may automatically change the question type to what it thinks fits best. For example, if you change where it says “untitled question” to say “Last name” it will most likely change your question type to a short answer for you.

To add more questions you click on the plus sign that’s in the bar next to the question

Google Forms saves everything automatically every few seconds so there is no worrying about saving your progress. Below is an example of a completed form.

Now for this form, there’s a setting I recommend turning on so that way you receive an email every time it’s filled out. You click on the top where it says responses. Once there you click on the 3 vertical dots. Then there will be a setting that says “get email notifications for each response” and you click on that so a check mark appears next to it. See below.

Now that you have a completed form it’s time to share it! On the top right is a purple Send button. You can add emails directly here on the form or if you want you can click on the center paperclip icon to get a link that you can copy and email out.

Once your staff has the form. They will be able to fill it out and you will get an email with a link saying the form has been completed. Once you have a response you can either manage it there in google forms or click the green icon that’s in the responses area to have a google spreadsheet created. The spreadsheet is nice because it will record the time the form was submitted.
 
If you want to get rid of responses because you have already seen the students. You go into the responses section and click on the 3 vertical dots. Then the bottom option is to delete all responses. This ONLY deletes them from Google Forms, if you put the data into a spreadsheet it will still be available there.

Again, Google Forms has a ton of uses, but right now I feel like I’m really benefiting from using it to help control the flow into my health office.