Module 2 Assignments

Assignment 2.1: Tell Us About Yourself

I am a high school Mathematics teacher.

Assignment 2.2: Explore Implementation with Forms

For this assignment, I created a virtual escape room challenge in Google Forms. The pdf of
the form is attached.

Assignment 2.2 Step 4

A. I chose this Form design because my students love escape room activities. I’ve
purchased a few before on Teachers Pfay Teachers but never have created one
myself. My students love working together on these, and it’s one of the few times that
I’ve noticed my students don’t mind a little productive struggle. Due to the self-
checking nature of the form, students are able to continue working without
interruption or wondering if they’re correct. The escape room I created covers
content in the second topic in our Algebra 2 curriculum: quadratic functions and
equations, for which I have not planned review days yet. This escape room will be an
activity for my students to complete on their first review day.
B. I found it very simple to organize the content of the form itself. Google Forms is
intuitive in that way. If you want to move a question from one place to another, drag
and drop. If you want to add an image, click the photo icon. There was very little I
wanted to do, but couldn’t. As for challenges, by far the hardest part was getting a
hang of the response validation feature. Since it’s an escape room, I had to make
sure that response validation was coded in such a way that the form would only
accept the exact correct solutions. To do this, I had to watch a video on “regular
expressions” which sounded way less complicated than it actually was. I learned to
code the answer “ABDC” as correct by using this syntax: “^[Aa][Bb][Dd][Cc]$”. The “^”
symbol tells the computer that this is the beginning of the expression, the letters
between the brackets are the acceptable letters for each slot in the answer, and the
dollar sign tells the computer that the response is complete. That way, students who
type “ABdC”, “ABdc”, or “abdc”, for example, would all be marked correct and move on.
 C. There are two other forms from the list in module 2 that I would like to implement in
the future. One of them includes the newsletter feature. I really like the idea of
sending a personalized email directly from my email account to parents’ and
students’ Gmail account. The reason I say this is because while our student
information system – Infinite Campus – is able to send customizable emails, a lot of
students and parents ignore those email addresses or even block them. Parents and
students are much more likely to read an email if it comes directly from me. Another
feature I’ve never used, but I’d like to in the future, is the branching feature in Google
Forms. Like most teachers, I teach several different math classes, and it sounds
efficient to use the same form for multiple classes if I have the ability to differentiate
what students get which questions from which class.

Assignment 2.3: Explore Implementation with Sheets

A. For this assignment, I chose to make a weekly lesson planning workbook in sheets.
Here’s a link to the sheet template:
[Link]
yPIVn1EE/edit?usp=sharing
I chose this because I already organize my lesson plans in a google sheet; however,
it is not nearly as organized or professional-looking as the documents I saw in the
videos attached to this module. For this example, I watched the video “Making
Teaching Lesson Plans in Google Sheets” and basically watched as my existing
lesson planning template turned into something much nicer. This sheets file will
directly improve my collaboration with coworkers on my Algebra 2 PLC as everyone
uses the same planning document to plan each unit.
B. I didn’t find anything about creating the sheets file difficult as the program is
essentially very intuitive. I just didn’t know how to effectively design a nice-looking
lesson planning document. The videos attached to this module were very helpful in
walking step by step through every formatting step. I watched in real time my
previous lesson planning document received a major improvement. I feel much more
confident now that I can create organized, visually appealing lesson plans on my
own.
C. In the future, I want to use a student data checklist and an interactive organizer.
Making my lesson planning Sheet showed me how helpful it is to have everything in
one place. The data checklist would make it easy to track behavior, projects, and IEP
 accommodations for my students. The interactive organizer would help students see,
compare, and understand information more clearly. Both Sheets would save me time,
keep things organized, and make learning easier for students. I think using them
together would make my classroom run smoother and help students, and myself, stay
on track.

Assignment 2.4: App Smash

For this assignment, I decided to investigate the Mail Merge extension in collaboration
with Google Sheets. By using Mail Merge in conjunction with my assessment retake/make
up form, I believe I can improve workflow efficiency. Instead of sending individual
personalized emails to each student that fills out the retake form, I can send a personalized
batch of emails all at once based on form responses. Here’s an example of the template I
created in Mail Merge:
As you can see from the screenshots, the template pulls each student’s email address from
their form submission along with which assessment they want to retake, where they want to
retake it, and what they have to do to earn the retake. This cut down on the amount of
students that ask me daily how and when to do retakes, giving me more time for classroom
activities and instruction.

Assignment 2.5: Connect Inquiry to Practice

A. In addition to being a math teacher, I also run the Improv team at my high school,
which involves holding auditions every year. Each year, I create a massive Google
Form for auditions that is linked to a Google Sheet to track all of the responses. I’m
very interested in spending more time learning about advanced tools and formulas
that can help me organize, sort, pull, and filter data in a Google Sheet. By improving
my skills, I hope to make the audition process more efficient and easier to manage.
Learning these techniques could also allow me to analyze trends over time, such as
which students audition or what types of performances are most popular.
B. While engaging with material in this course, I stumbled upon Ben Collins’s free
course called “Advanced Formulas: 30 Day Challenge”. The URL is
[Link] Admittedly, I got a little carried away and completed
the lessons for the first 5 days in a single session. Additionally, I went down a Google
 Forms escape room rabbit hole after assignment 2.3 and found the following website
that simply has a bunch of links to various escape room examples inspiring:
[Link]
VugZm9c/edit?tab=t.0 I especially got a kick out of the Harry Potter themed escape
room and might edit it to have math questions for my students in the future.
C. Very simply, from the escape room list, I learned a few things. One thing I learned
was that you can create multiple sections just for photo clues, and have the “lock” in a
different section. This forces students to click back and forth which would make it
more challenging than if the entire clue was on one page. This makes the challenge a
little more engaging and not so static. Additionally, I did a deep dive into the
VLOOKUP formula in sheets and Ben Collins’s tutorials regarding the function. I think
that tool specifically will be very helpful organizing and pulling audition data for when
I run auditions every year for the improv team.