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Edmonton Spelling Test on Google Forms

I’ve been using the The Edmonton Spelling List for my grade 5 class. Because we’ve switched to at home, online learning I created a Google Form as a place for them to write their answers. It’s a nice bonus that Google Forms marks it automatically.

Not long after I instructed my students to load up the Google Form, my stomach sank. Sure, a few students loaded it with no trouble, but other students began complaining about a warning / they were unable to continue. It wasn’t clear at first what was causing the problem. Then, one after another, the students who were complaining started to drop out of the classroom meetup.

It turns out that I had put the Google Form in “Lock-down mode” because I didn’t want their browsers giving them hints on how to spell the words or tabbing over to Google to get a helpful correction on the words. Well, lock-down mode locked the students out of the tab that had the meet-up. A few of the students rebooted and rejoined the class but another more intrepid student began filling in all 50 blank questions with non-sense so that it would allow him to submit it. That’s one way to kill ten minutes of class time.

Long story short, lock-down mode would have been great for in-school learning but it didn’t work for online schooling. I ended up having them do a version not locked down and just pretended that browsers don’t underline misspelled words.

The list below has copy generating links in case other teachers want to make a copy.