9 online form integrations to try this school year

Attendance sheets? Equipment logs? Student evaluation forms? Lesson plans? A lot of paperwork goes into teaching elementary school students.

Today, more teachers are choosing online forms to streamline administrative and repetitive processes. When you use online forms, you can integrate with other digital tools to automate tasks, leaving you more time to focus on your students. Plus, using online tools can even foster productivity, responsibility, and creativity for your students.

In this post, we’re sharing how you can use Jotform with nine popular software integrations to get more done.

Save time grading quizzes with Quiz Form

From spelling tests to reading comprehension and social studies quizzes, grading tests by hand is one of the most tedious tasks for teachers. One of the advantages of switching to digital quizzes is that you can use tools like Quiz Form. This tool automatically grades quizzes and tests for you.

Collect payments quickly with PayPal

Whether you’re collecting money for an extracurricular activity, a school field trip, or classroom supplies, you can accept payments automatically through PayPal. With PayPal, you can not only get notifications when someone pays, but you can also transfer that money directly into a bank account or debit card when it’s time to pay.

This is more efficient than the old way of having parents stick a check in an envelope in their kid’s backpack. You had to rely on the child to remember to hand the envelope to you, and once you had all of the checks, you still had to go to the bank to cash it. Not to mention, who still uses checks regularly in 2019?

Upload and organize files quickly with Google Drive or Dropbox

One of the easiest ways to get more done is to sync your online form to either Google Drive or Dropbox. For example, you can have students submit homework assignments and daily or weekly progress reports through an online form. All of their attached assignments automatically get synced into a Google Drive folder with their name on it. At any given time, you can open up one folder and see all of the assignments a particular student has completed.

Create lesson plans with Trello

Trello can be a great tool for organizing lesson plans and classroom activities. Sometimes, the best ideas strike when you’re not in front of your computer. One way to combat this is to create an idea form. Whenever you, or any of your students for that matter, have an idea for a classroom lesson or activity, you can fill out the form on your phone, tablet, or computer. Then it’s automatically routed to your Trello board.

This is also a great way to start teaching students some basic project management skills, which will come in handy as they get older.

Keep parents up to date on important classroom news with Mailchimp

One of the best ways to keep parents in the loop about how their kids are doing and what they’re learning is through a weekly newsletter. At the start of the school year, you can create a signup form to collect email addresses for parents. Then, automatically sync it with Mailchimp, which is free for the first 2,000 contacts.

Get notified of new form submissions immediately using Chrome Notifier

There are many use cases for using Chrome Notifier, including equipment sign-in and sign-out logs, so you can keep track of everything in the classroom.

Get a text message when someone fills out a form using Ifttt

If you want to get notifications of new form submissions on your smartphone, you can set up Ifttt. This can be useful when you’re waiting for a student to submit a late homework assignment or looking for parents to volunteer to chaperone a field trip.

Send new submissions to Google Sheets

From student progress reports to course evaluation forms and talent school submissions, keep track of all form submissions in one Google spreadsheet. You can then visualize and analyze the data through charts, graphs, and pivot tables.

Connect your form to Google Calendar

One of the most powerful Jotform features is the ability to automatically create Google calendar invites from new submissions. This can be particularly useful when you’re trying to schedule parent-teacher conferences.

In sum, these are nine ways to integrate online forms in the classroom.

If you’re looking for inspiration on all of the ways you can use online forms to be productive, check out our education form templates.