How to Create a Tech Help Site With Google Forms

This afternoon I hosted a free webinar titled Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support (the recording will be available later this evening). One of the strategies that I talked about and demonstrated in the webinar was using Google Forms to create a tech help resource to share with your colleagues. This can be done by using branching logic otherwise known as "go to section based on answer" in Google Forms.

Create a tech help site with Google Forms start by adding an opening multiple choice question that asks people to pick the topic that they need help with. Then create a section in the Google Form for each topic that is listed in the opening question. Within each section you can include video tutorials and links to additional resources. At the end of each section put in another question that lets visitors return to the home screen or exit from the Form. The "go to section based on answer" feature of Google Forms will let you direct people to the appropriate section based on how they answer the first question on the Form. Watch my video below to see how the whole process works. You can see my demo Form right here.



Once you've built your tech help Google Form you can embed it into your existing website or simply email it to people who could benefit from using it.

You'll notice in the video above that I included a section in my Form for "something else" in which people can book an appointment with me via Google Calendar. That is done with Google Calendar appointment pages. This video can show you how to do that.

Save Time With This Google Calendar Scheduling Tip

Here's a little tip that I passed along to a colleague yesterday morning that might help some of you too. When you're scheduling meetings that are going to happen on a consistent schedule you can go into the "more options" for the event on your calendar and set a custom, repeating schedule. This saves you the step of having to manually add every event in a sequence.

I used this method to schedule all of my Google Hangout Meetings for my computer science students for the rest of the year. If you need to add video conferencing to your event, you can do that in the same place that you set your repeating schedule and have the meeting link automatically added to every event in the sequence. Watch my short video below to see how this works.

Create Online Art Galleries With Wakelet, Padlet, and Google Sites

In last week's episode of The Practical Ed Tech Podcast I answered a question from a reader who was looking for a way for students to be able to submit examples of their artwork and have them displayed in a public gallery. The suggestion that I made on the podcast was to try using Wakelet or Padlet to gather and display examples. I made a couple of videos to show how both of those services can be used to create online art galleries. Both services let you embed your galleries into Google Sites and other website builders. In the following videos I demonstrate how to use Wakelet and Padlet to create online art galleries.

The advantage of Padlet is that is has more design options than Wakelet does. Padlet also has more content moderation options than Wakelet does. The advantage of Wakelet is that you can make as many collections as you like for free whereas Padlet limits you to three for free.

Free Webinar Tomorrow - Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support - Take 2!

Yesterday afternoon I hosted a webinar titled Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support. The software that I used to host the webinar did not work as planned and practiced. And the recording did not come out well either. Therefore, tomorrow at 1pm ET I'm going to host the webinar again, but this time it will be back on old, reliable GoToWebinar.

If you were in Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support, thank you for putting up with the clunkiness and the screen sharing not working. If you were waiting to see the recording, it came out so poorly that I'm not going to distribute it. I'm going to host Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support again tomorrow at 1pm ET. It will be run through GoToWebinar. You can register here. A recording will be available afterwards.

A few highlights of tomorrow's webinar will include:

• Keeping IT human.
• Managing & prioritizing requests. 
• Developing self-support resources.

The webinar will include theory as well as step-by-step demonstrations. 

Sometimes It Pays to Pay - Or When a Webinar Crashes to a Halt

Much of my online reputation is built on free technology for teachers. That said, there are services I do pay to use because I've not found other options that are as good. Case in point, I pay $200 per month to license GoToWebinar because I've never found anything to be as reliable. In almost ten years of using it for hundreds of live events, it has only failed me twice. Which is why I feel a little foolish for trying a different service for a free webinar that I hosted yesterday. That other service failed miserably during the webinar that I ran yesterday. I'm going to run the webinar again tomorrow, but it will be back on GoToWebinar where I know all of the functions I need will work reliably.

The last 18 months have been pretty lean around here so I've been looking for ways to cut costs. One of the ways that I thought I could do that was by trying another webinar service. My GoToWebinar subscription and my ConvertKit subscription (the service I use for email mailing lists) are the biggest costs of keeping Free Technology for Teachers and Practical Ed Tech running. The service that I tried yesterday offered a free trial and was 75% cheaper than GoToWebinar on a monthly basis. It even had slick templates for making registration pages! Lesson learned, again, sometimes what looks good and cheap is just cheap.

If you were in yesterday's live webinar, Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support, thank you for putting up with the clunkiness and the screen sharing not working. If you were waiting to see the recording, it came out so poorly that I'm not going to distribute it. I'm going to host Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support again tomorrow at 1pm ET. It will be run through GoToWebinar. You can register here. A recording will be available afterwards.