I was very excited this year to create a Google Form and have my 3rd-5th graders vote for their favorite Bluebonnet book electronically instead of paper voting.
With the paper voting I had to tally the votes, count them up, and hope I didn't make a mistake. I LOVE how Google is able to do all that for me.
It took me 10 minutes at most to create the form. I hadn't used Google Forms in awhile so I had to remember how to delete the sections I didn't want and how add more options. If I hadn't had to do all that I probably could of knocked it out quicker.
I told our tech department a few months back what I was wanting to do to make sure I could do this. They sent me an Excel sheet organized by grade level with each students' email address so all I had to do was copy and paste the email addressess into the shared box and hit send.
Then this morning during library time... I reminded students how to log into their gmail accounts. Students could get logged into their Google accounts but could not access their email.
After lots of hair pulling, lots of "Hang on. I know there's a problem. Put your hand down. I know. I'm working on it," a phone call to the Help Desk, a text to the District Technical Support Coordinator (we go way back), and finally a phone call with her, I find out that we were breaking HIPAA because children under 13 aren't suppose to have email accounts. So they were disabled. The district is working on getting the setting to where our students can only email within our domain which will fix the HIPPA issue.
This afternoon our campus digital learning teacher and I will be sitting down to brainstorm how I can still do voting digitally. Without having talked to her yet I'm thinking Google Classroom but I'm going to wait to see what ideas she has.
Although this activity crashed and it's not my fault, I still feel the sting of failure in this lesson. I keep reminding myself that I am only failing forward and that we will get this figured out.
With the paper voting I had to tally the votes, count them up, and hope I didn't make a mistake. I LOVE how Google is able to do all that for me.
It took me 10 minutes at most to create the form. I hadn't used Google Forms in awhile so I had to remember how to delete the sections I didn't want and how add more options. If I hadn't had to do all that I probably could of knocked it out quicker.
I told our tech department a few months back what I was wanting to do to make sure I could do this. They sent me an Excel sheet organized by grade level with each students' email address so all I had to do was copy and paste the email addressess into the shared box and hit send.
Then this morning during library time... I reminded students how to log into their gmail accounts. Students could get logged into their Google accounts but could not access their email.
After lots of hair pulling, lots of "Hang on. I know there's a problem. Put your hand down. I know. I'm working on it," a phone call to the Help Desk, a text to the District Technical Support Coordinator (we go way back), and finally a phone call with her, I find out that we were breaking HIPAA because children under 13 aren't suppose to have email accounts. So they were disabled. The district is working on getting the setting to where our students can only email within our domain which will fix the HIPPA issue.
This afternoon our campus digital learning teacher and I will be sitting down to brainstorm how I can still do voting digitally. Without having talked to her yet I'm thinking Google Classroom but I'm going to wait to see what ideas she has.
Although this activity crashed and it's not my fault, I still feel the sting of failure in this lesson. I keep reminding myself that I am only failing forward and that we will get this figured out.
When it works, technology is fantastic. I think we have all had some experience with tech fails. I hope you get it all worked out.
ReplyDeleteSad that it didn't work as planned right away. Once the problem is solved the voting will happen for sure and you will all be excited to read the results.
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