If you read my last blogpost, you know I have two kids. One is in middle school, while the other is in elementary school. While certain things have gotten more modern for them compared to my time in school, many parts of their day to day activities have not. For example, it always surprises me that my daughter is issued a laptop for the school year, but a large part of her testing is still done on paper. The teacher then puts the scores in online, and if we want to see them, we have to remember to go and check a different website. Sometimes the original test paper is never even returned. It makes it hard to take action and help her focus her studies for the next test.
This is a major reason I was so happy to see Microsoft Forms released recently. It allows teachers to make quizzes where students can answer questions and see right away what they got right/wrong and their score. It’s incredible simple to get started –
1. Click “New Quiz”
2. Enter a Title (or optionally, a picture) and click “Add question” and which type of question
3. Enter the question details, marking things like which is the correct answer, whether it is required, etc. Repeat until you’ve done creating questions.
4. Share it out to the students, or make a public link and share it with anyone!
If you’re thinking Google Forms does something similar, yes, I know. But Google Forms doesn’t integrate with Microsoft Flow, while Microsoft Forms now does. Now it’s possible to set up an e-mail alert to the parents/tutor/whomever and send the results when their son/daughter has finished the test. Now before you scream “helicopter parent”, it’s important to keep this in context. I wouldn’t expect to have the teacher do this for every test, or for every student. But there are times where it could be quite valuable and a great way to drive action, vs. hoping that you go check/your kid tells you/etc.
To setup a new flow with Microsoft Flow, it’s really easy. You open the Flow app from your Office 365 account and click “Create From Blank” –
Next, type “Forms” to see all the different items for Microsoft Forms you can trigger an action for –
After selecting that, I choose the form from the dropdown to create the Flow for –
I want to make it conditional based on the e-mail address entered for the first question. I select “Add a condition” and the question I want to trigger the flow based on the student response –
Then I entered the condition parameter and value to match, and what to do if it matches –
I save the flow, and now I’ll get an e-mail when she finishes this quiz, along with her answers (if that is setup to be included).
This also allows me to do things like setup a Flow for inserting a new row in an Excel document when a student answers a question, etc. That makes it easy to quickly analyze the results in Power BI and see the total points she got vs. total available points!
It took me less than a half an hour to create a quiz, create a flow, and view the results in Power BI. I’m excited to see the potential there for students and teachers to take advantage of this. Personally, I’m already thinking of some great new ways to I could see everyone use these tools and others from Microsoft to engage throughout the entire school year.
Thanks for reading!
Christopher Finlan 