What is MS Forms?
Microsoft Forms is an intuitive and customisable online platform that is part of the Microsoft 365 suite. It is a valuable tool for engaging students, checking understanding, and improving the overall learning experience.
What can I do with MS Forms?
You can use Forms to create interactive quizzes, surveys, and polls to incorporate active learning in your face-to-face and online teaching, to support student engagement and inclusivity.
Here are some examples of how you can use Forms:
Community building
You can use forms to create ice breaker activities or warm up questions before or at the start of your teaching session.
Provide a link to a Form on Blackboard and ask students to answer the question(s) to prepare for the session. You can use a Forms quiz as an activity at the beginning of a session to focus your class on the topic.
Assessment and feedback
You can create interactive quizzes, surveys, and polls using a range of question types (e.g. multiple choice, ranking, word cloud) and gather real-time feedback during in class or in an online session. You can use Forms to:
- Create customised questions including multimedia elements
- Set automated grading for quizzes
- Check students’ existing knowledge
- Ask quick questions for instant feedback – check in-class understanding
- Conclude a session with a quiz and a debrief
- Guide in-class discussions in the right direction
- Share live results in real time and export them to Excel for deeper analysis.
Sharing ideas and inclusion
Forms provides a means for all students to contribute fairly, especially in larger classes where student numbers might pose limitations on equal participation. It can be an effective way to engage quieter students in the classroom, and the anonymous option might encourage participation and interaction
Effective classroom engagement
Forms can help you connect with students during the session, so they feel more involved. You can use Forms:
- as an activity to gain/maintain students’ attention/interest
- at strategic points to break up the session
- to generate discussions – for example, discuss and analyse the answers with students.