Friday, March 22, 2013

The Chrome Store and Pictures in Google Forms!

Fellow Google Certified Trainers, Eric Curts and Sean Beavers, recently developed a site to evaluate the Chrome Web Apps and Extensions. Extensions and Apps have been a long-time favorite of mine. Now, with the help of this site, users can submit reviews while GCTs evaluate the reviews and the apps. This is the place to go to find out what the best Apps and Extensions are at the Chrome Web Store! And, if you are not already going to the Chrome Web Store, now is the time to start. The Web Store is one of the many things that makes the Chrome browser a unique and personal browser. And, Chrome Web Apps and Extensions are mostly free! As Google Apps for Education users, they make your experience more enhanced.

On a similar note, Google Forms have also been a long-time favorite of mine. However, they lack the ability to add in pictures to forms. There are a variety of times when I would have like to add in a picture--for instance: voting, diagrams, charts, graphs, etc. To add a picture, in the past, you had to be somewhat familiar with HTML code. This made it inaccessible for many teachers and common users. You had to create a form and grab its HTML code, paste it in a a Website like Google sites, and add in image tags, making sure the images had associated URLs. In doing so, the form no longer stood on its own.

Now, there is a script to help you with this process! You can find the instructions and more information on it here. To add pictures into forms this way, you just have to create a form as you normally would with the addition of placeholders for where you would like your images, upload pictures to Google Drive, copy the form URL to the Website linked above. It will then generate a new URL for you to send out. All results are still posted in the corresponding spreadsheet. With this script, I will be making many more forms with images!