Google Forms
Senior 6 · ICT
Google Forms
Lesson 1 of 4
22 min
The S6 class representatives at a boarding school in Musanze are organising a career day. Six professionals will each run a session, and every one of the school's 600 students must choose one. Last year the prefects collected paper slips. Some were lost, some were unreadable, and two prefects spent an evening typing the rest into a spreadsheet. This year they want each student to choose on a phone or in the computer lab, with the choices already in a spreadsheet the moment they are made.
That is the job an online form does. Google Forms is one of the most widely used tools for it, and it is free with a Google account. In this unit you will build forms that collect data safely, quizzes that mark themselves, and a spreadsheet that turns raw responses into a report.
Definition
Online form: a web page of questions whose answers are sent to a central store when the person filling it in presses Submit. Example: a club registration form opened from a link.
Google Forms: Google's web application for building online forms, surveys and quizzes. It is part of Google Workspace and opens at forms.google.com or from Google Drive (New → Google Forms).
Respondent (Google calls them a responder): a person who fills in the form. Response: one respondent's complete set of answers, stored as one record.
A form is only the front door. The answers do not stay on the respondent's phone: each submission travels over the internet and is stored with the form in Google's cloud. The owner sees them as charts on the Responses tab and, if they link a spreadsheet, as one row per response in Google Sheets.
Two groups of people touch a form, and they need different permissions. Editors (the owner and any collaborators) can change the questions and see every response. Respondents can only fill it in. Keeping these two groups apart is the first rule of a secure form.
Choosing the right question type is the most important design decision you make, because it decides what kind of data comes back. A free-text box invites "S6 MPC", "s6mpc" and "Senior 6 (MPC)" for the same class; a dropdown returns one exact spelling every time.
| Type | What the respondent does | Data you get | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Short answer | Types one line | Free text (can be validated as a number, length or pattern) | Name, phone number, age |
| Paragraph | Types several lines | Long free text | Comments, explanations |
| Multiple choice | Picks exactly one option | One category | Session chosen, yes or no |
| Checkboxes | Ticks any number of options | A list of categories | "Which clubs are you in?" |
| Dropdown | Picks one item from a list | One category | Class, district: long lists |
| File upload | Attaches a file | A file saved in the owner's Google Drive | A CV, a photo of homework |
| Linear scale | Picks a number on a scale, e.g. 1 to 5 | A whole number | "How useful was the session?" |
| Rating | Picks a number of stars or other icons | A whole number | Quick satisfaction scores |
| Multiple choice grid | One choice in each row of a grid | One category per row | Rating several items on the same scale |
| Checkbox grid | Any choices in each row | A list per row | "Which days can you attend each activity?" |
| Date / Time | Picks a date or a time | A date or a time value | Date of birth, arrival time |
Two settings on every question shape the data further. Required stops the respondent submitting without answering. Response validation (on short answer, paragraph and checkboxes) rejects answers that break a rule, for example "a number between 15 and 25" or "text of at most 200 characters".
Definition
Data validation (in Forms, response validation): a rule that an answer must satisfy before the form accepts it. Example: a phone-number field that accepts only text matching the pattern 07[2389][0-9]{7}, the ten-digit shape of Rwandan mobile numbers.
Structured data: data whose possible values are fixed in advance (a choice from a list), so it can be counted directly. Unstructured data: free text that has to be read or cleaned before it can be counted.
When you open a new form you see the editor. The sketch below labels the parts you will use in every lesson of this unit. Google redesigns its screens from time to time, so a button may move, but these parts have stayed stable.
Kevin Stratvert: Google Forms Tutorial. Watch how a form is created from Google Drive, how each question type behaves, and where the Settings and Responses tabs are. Note any button that has moved since the video was recorded.
Worked example 1: choose the question types
Design the career-day form. For each item of data, choose a type and justify it.
| Data needed | Type | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Student's full name | Short answer, required | Names cannot be listed in advance. |
| Class (S1 A … S6 PCM) | Dropdown, required | About 20 fixed values: a dropdown keeps the list short on a phone screen and gives one spelling. |
| Session chosen | Multiple choice, required | Exactly one of six sessions, so the choices can be counted. |
| Topics they would like next year | Checkboxes | A student may want several. |
| How useful was last year's career day? | Linear scale 1 to 5 | A number can be averaged. |
Notice what the form does not ask: home address, parents' phone numbers or date of birth. The organisers do not need them, so collecting them would only add risk.
Worked example 2: is the form worth building?
Last year, typing one paper slip into a spreadsheet took about 20 seconds. Estimate the typing time saved for 600 students.
The form removes all of this typing, and the typing errors with it. It costs perhaps 30 minutes to build and test, so it saves almost three hours on the first use, and more each year it is reused.
A "shared, secure" form controls three things.
| Control | Where to set it | What it protects |
|---|---|---|
| Editors | ⋮ (More) menu → Add collaborators | Only trusted people can change questions or read every answer. Each editor has full access to the responses. |
| Responders | Publish → manage who can respond: anyone with the link, or only named people or your organisation | Strangers cannot fill in a form meant for one school. |
| Email collection | Settings → Responses → Collect email addresses (Do not collect, Verified, or Responder input) | Verified records the signed-in Google account, so nobody can type someone else's address. |
| Limit to 1 response | Settings → Responses | Each Google account can submit only once. Respondents must sign in, so people without a Google account cannot respond. |
| Accepting responses | Responses tab switch | Close the form after the deadline so late or fake answers cannot arrive. |
Warning
Never ask for a password or a PIN. No school, bank or mobile-money company asks for a password, a mobile-money PIN or a one-time code through a form. Fake forms that do are a common kind of phishing. Google prints a line at the bottom of every form, "Never submit passwords through Google Forms", for exactly this reason.
Rwanda's Law N° 058 of 2021 relating to the protection of personal data and privacy requires that personal data be collected for a clear purpose, kept to what that purpose needs, and protected. A form that asks only for what it needs is easier to keep safe.
Tip
Plan on paper first. Before you open Forms, write three columns: data I need, question type, why I need it. Any row with an empty "why" should be deleted. This one habit gives cleaner data and a safer form.
forms.google.com and click Blank form (the large +).Check: you have finished when you can point to the five numbered parts of the editor sketch on your own screen, and when your form's description says what the data is for.
Practice
Sources and credits
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.