I've spent the last couple of hours or so looking for ways to take my paper and pencil surveys and quizzes that are given to my classes during the first week or two, and convert them into electronic formats. The surveys are a way to get to know my students. Having just had to pack up my school office, I realize just how much space papers can take up. Being able to do this electronically would be wonderful. Quizzes would also be great to have a way to give them easily, where students get their results immediately. I'll be using Blackboard for my Math 120 class and giving reading quizzes there. I can set them to only be available for a certain length of time, so students have to meet deadlines. Downside? Entering questions in Bb can be annoying. Upsides? Students get immediate feedback on their answers, have a place to go back and review their quizzes (for the 2 or so students who will do this), once the quizzes are created, I don't have to do much to maintain them (I'm nearly halfway done entering them already).

Here are some interesting things I've found along the way:

• ZohoChallenge
  You can login with your Google account (at least that's how I got in). It allows you to create quizzes that are graded automatically. Downside, it looks like you can only have 25 "candidates" to keep records on.
  
• proProfs
  Free embeddable quizzes. Not sure how the data is collected for the instructor; will have to check it out later.
• Self-grading Google quizzes
  Cool way to grade multiple choice quizzes using Google forms. No immediate feedback to students, and not able to be used by students to study from, at least not easily. But, easy to grade once the assignment due date has passed.

So, my summer work begins. I think I'll be using this blog as a way to document what I am doing this summer. It will then hold a history of the interesting (and not so interesting) places I've found on the web.