Using Google Forms to help students work together to find resources

Today in my Psychology class I tried something a little different.

We were about to start a review of Jean Piaget and his theories of Cognitive Development.  I briefly explained some of the features of each of the key stages of development.

I divided the class into four groups (for the four stages of development) and then I asked students to do research on two questions:

1. Find one example of a feature of that stage of development. For example, the development of the concept of Conservation at the  Concrete Operational stage.
   
2. Find one way that researchers test to see if children have reached developed that concept.
   

I created a Google form (below) to collect data from students about the information they have found:

As you can see, students need to add the link, categorise it (a concrete operational skill!) and then give a brief summary of what the resource is about.

Within 15 minutes, students had submitted over 30 resources.

Some were not unique but I found that if I sorted according to website url, I could see the replicates and eventually ended up with 21 unique sources of information.

I will add these to a shared Google Docs file called "Links and Worthwhile Articles" so that all students can have a look at these resources.

At the end of the lesson, I chose four people at random to answer the questions - and they did a really good job.

Google Forms is so easy to use (it took me 10 minutes to mock this up) and it is a great way to gather information from students.