One Great Thing: FormMule

Look closely... This is what "OH YEAHHHH" looks like.

During our Google Teacher Academy Austin chat, somebody tossed out an idea on Voxer about showing people "one great thing" that we do in our line of work.  Most of what I do is the standard run-of-the-mill work that supports teachers and helps them do cool stuff in their classrooms.  We are all doing this in one form or another, so that's nothing special.  There is one pretty cool product that my colleague, Wes Batcheller, and I have come up with:

Request For Training

Before things get too cloudy, I need to give credit where credit is due.  Katie Regan and Kelly Kermode are the geniuses behind what you see in the magical jaw-droppedness that we get to experience.  How does it work?  I thought you'd never ask.

Nothing special, right?  At first glance, it really is just a Google Form, so no, nothing special.  To dissect this a little, I'll break it down:

Name automatically puts the requestors name onto a calendar event that gets created on form submit.

Site automatically gets loaded as the location in FormMule on the event on form submit (we appended it with "High School" to have Google automatically recognize it as an address and get us directions. Some say lazy. We say efficient.

Room Number is nothing special, but it gets added to the notes section of the form submission.

Email Address is there so we can send back an automatic reply with their requested date, time, and a description of what they wanted help with.  Folks like reminders, right?  We have ourselves CC'd on the email so that we receive it in our notifications and can contact the requestor if there is a conflict in the schedule or we need clarification.  Booyah.

Date Requested, Time to Start, and Time to End are all there to create a calendar event in our Google Calendar that we have associated with our tech coach email.  As soon as someone fills this out and submits, a calendar event is created for that date, starting time, and ending time.  Pretty sweet, eh?!

Description of Support Requested is loaded into the notes of our calendar event and also reiterated back to the requestor in the automated email, just to remind them of what they were requesting and give us a heads up as to what's on our calendar.

Here are some screenshots that explain the process of setting up FormMule to work properly with what we are trying to do:

The first stage in the script (or Add-on) process is setting up the email merge.  We have ours set so that any entry that has something will push a merge, just because the email address is mandatory.

This part is fun. We have the boxes selected on the lefthand side to turn on the calendar-event merge as well as creating a new calendar event on submission.  We created a separate Google Calendar for all of these requests and input the Calendar ID into the appropriate slot. Using the tags on the right, we made it easy to identify in our new events who the person is, where they're from, what time they want us there, and what they want.  WHABAM.

A closer look at the tags that we use in the calendar event creation.

This is our email merge message.  We need to clean this up and offer something a little bit better, but it's 'good enough' for now.  If anything, it drops an email into the requestor's inbox that serves as the much-appreciated reminder that they submitted the form, got validated for doing so, and someone will be there to help.

If you have any questions on how we set this up or would like to chat about it, feel free to get in touch.  Just please don't fill out the form :)

Happy "Making Your Life Easier, One Submission At A Time" Fishing