Google Forms + Data Studio = A Match Made In Heaven!

Since it's almost Valentine's Day, I thought I'd highlight one of my favorite couples - Google Forms and Google Data Studio! 

Google Form data (saved in a Google Sheet) is a GREAT starting point for educators looking to get started creating a Google Data Studio report. Why? One main reason is that the structure of the data works well as a Data Studio data source, since it has just a single header row, no merged cells, no blank rows, and consistency in field values.

Here are a few tips for developing Google Forms to use with Data Studio:

• Use very short questions. Try using just 1-2 words in the Google Forms question field, then and putting the full details of the question in the description. These questions become your column headers in Sheets and thus your field names in Data Studio, and this makes them much more manageable.
  
• Avoid "Check all that apply" type questions. Try using a multiple choice grid type question (with yes/no answers) instead. This makes the data more compatible with filtering in Data Studio.
  
• Build a sort order into your responses. If the responses to a question have a particular order (like Daily, Weekly, Monthly), try including a sort order in the responses (1-Daily, 2-Weekly, 3-Monthly) so that when you sort in Data Studio they sort correctly. (Yes, you could do this with a calculated field in GDS too, but why make things harder if you don't have to?) Linear scale questions are a good option for this too, especially if you want to report on the average response number.
  
• Build your report first based on sample data. I will often build my report BEFORE sending out the Form, using the Form Responses tab with some rows of sample data (I usually try to add enough sample data that all possible answers are in the data set for each question.). I then remove my sample data once real data starts coming in.
• Take advantage of "live" updating. If you've built your Data Studio report, and the data continues to come in via the Form, the report will continue to update (automatically every 15 minutes). This is great for "leaderboard" type reports when you've built out the report ahead of time (see previous bullet)
  
• Capture email addresses. If your data source contains email addresses, you can use the Filter by Email feature to create customized reports. Or, you can use the email addresses as a unique identifier to pull in additional information on top of what's collected in the Form.

Here are some of my favorite examples of Data Studio projects that use Google Form data:

Surveys & Voting

• Social Media Use Survey

• Christmas Cookie Contest Leaderboard

Resource Collections

• SEL Resource Collection

• Digital Learning Tools Training Materials Collection

• Approved/Unapproved Resource List

Student Work

• Remote Learning Project Log

• Massachusetts Cities and Towns Research Project

• Student Reading Log

Do you have any other great examples? Please feel free to submit them to the K-12 Data Studio Report Collection!

Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day! ♥

A Whole New World for Google Form Data

Think about all the different ways we use Google Forms in education...assessments, exit tickets, surveys, RSVPs, logs, and more! Well, Google Forms feed Google Sheets. And Google Sheets feed Google Data Studio!

While Google Forms does have its own basic reporting tools (bar charts and pie graphs), if we attach the Google Sheet results of a Google Form to Google Data Studio, we can do so much more with the data! Not only in terms of visualizing the data, but also in terms of sharing the data. I want to present two examples that illustrate how amazing this can be.

First, an example from Craig Sheil who used Data Studio to visualize the results of a student survey about social media use at Bedford (NH) High School. In previous years, the results of the survey were shared with students via Google Slides (using screen shots of the graphs from the Form results). This year, the results were compiled into a Data Studio report, including some interactive filters, allowing for a dynamic exploration of the data.

The second example is based on work by Elissa Malespina who created a Google Data Studio report of student reading log data back in October of 2018 (while at Somerville Middle School in NJ). When I saw her example, I was really excited to see Data Studio being used with students (and amazed at how ahead of the times Elissa was!). However, I knew that some of the Data Studio updates since 2018 could really enhance what she had already started. I reached out and she agreed to share the (anonymized) data with me, so that I could update her report with some new features.

I've extended the example to illustrate how one data set could be used to display data to different audiences. The first page shows the school-level data, with lots of built-in interactive filters. The subsequent pages show classroom-level data and student-level data, which could be built with either report-level filters or using the new Filter By Email feature in Data Studio.

What Google Form data do you have that might lend itself to a Data Studio report? I'd love to find some more examples of student-submitted data to use to build reports! Or, if you've already built a report, please submit it to the K-12 Data Studio Report Collection!