Digital Reading Conference Form

I have been doing reading conferences during Daily 5 time in my classroom for a solid 2 1/2 school years. I am a firm believer that the Daily 5 program isn't being used effectively until you are meeting with students and conducting reading conferences.

Each year, I have set up a large binder like "The Sisters" did with a tab for each student. It was about 2 inches thick and full of papers, dividers, and other items. I lugged it with me from conference to conference, hand-writing notes from the conferences quickly so that I wouldn't miss anything.

Well, the problem with writing quickly is that my hand writing is awful. It looks like chicken scratch. I don't have "cute teacher handwriting." :-( So, I was always annoyed that my binder looked messy.

I saw on a few teacher blogs that people were creating Google Forms to manage their reading conferences. I had never been on Google Docs before, but I decided to check it out.

I used one of the other teacher's forms as a guide as well as my own memory of what my conference forms look like, and I created a very cute, very functional form that I can use during reading conferences either on a computer or my iPad.

One point that the other teachers made about using this type of form versus carrying around the huge binder is that the binder can sometimes be intimidating to students. The more I thought about it, the more intimidated I would be if my teacher brought a 2 inch binder to a conference and wrote things down while I was reading and responding. These streamlined forms on the Internet provide a less intimidating experience for the kids...in my opinion, of course.

The best part about this form is that there is a summary option where you can see helpful, colorful graphs of all of your reading conference form data. You can easily see your students' strength areas and improvement areas in graph form, which I think would be awesome for showing parents at conference time or bringing to a meeting about a student's progress. Schools are now relying on black and white data as much as possible, and this is just another way to meet that need.

Here is the link to the form I made...you will first be taken to the "spreadsheet" view (not so cute). Go to Form and then click on Go to Live Form and you will see what it looks like all said and done.
Reading Conference Form

If you would like to get started, just go here and click on Create and then select Form. You can play around with cute themes and types of questions from there. It's really very easy! Then you can save it to your Google Docs page and access it either by emailing it to yourself or if you can access www.google.com from school, you're set!

I love technology!