Constitution Day and a Google Form

Today I am celebrating Constitution Day in my history class by showing one of the Schoolhouse Rock videos that covers some aspect of the Constitution. There were five:

1. Preamble to the Constitution
2. Three-ring circus structure of federal government)
3. I'm just a bill (legislative process)
4. Electoral college (how the president is elected)
5. Sufferin' till suffrage (the vote for women)

This class covers US history up to 1865 so we haven't reached the constitution-writing stage. Maybe when we get there I will watch all five in class and ask the students to compare them to the text or other sources in terms of interpreting the Constitution.

For today we'll watch just one and I will have the class decide which by using a Google Form to conduct an in-class poll. I call this my "history quickie" and got a custom bit.ly link that points to the form. I try to do this each time we meet and ask them questions like what was the hardest thing to understand in class, etc. I post the summary of results inside my learning management system so students can see them.

I reuse the same form each day so that all the results are on the same spreadsheet. I found a trick to add the new question to the form then delete the old one. This creates a new column in the spreadsheet, which makes for easier collection of results if I want to do additional analysis.

And like true American democracy, this vote will not be perfect. The only voters will be people who have a smart phone, tablet, or laptop in class. So the more perfect union that the founders envisioned does not yet exist, at least in my history class.

GaGA Group Site

Our district has a Google Apps account, and last semester I used the Google Sites tool to conduct a group assignment. On the first day of the class I asked the students to pick which of the course questions most interested them, and I used this to divide them into groups. I created a site for each group and assigned the group's members as editors of the site.