A few weeks ago, I posted a little hack that I like to use for making student answers in Google Docs easier to find. You can see that post here. Multiple people reminded me of a practice that many elementary educators love using:
Instead of just pre-formatting the answer space, actually create an answer table. This makes it less likely that students accidentally mess up the pre-existing content in the doc and makes their answers easier to find. This is a great practice when assigning these Docs as Make a Copy for Each Student in Google Classroom.
There are 3 different ways to do this. I’ll show each in the GIF below and then go over them in some additional detail below the GIF.
More details on what you see in the GIF below . . .
- Add a 1×1 table for the answer. This is certainly the easiest way to do it, but unfortunately Google Docs forces tables, no matter how narrow, into a new line. So, your answers will always be below the questions.
- Add a 1×2 table for the question & the answer. This is an improvement, because it allows you to keep the answers and questions side-by-side. The downside is that it would be repetitious if you had lots of questions or prompts.
- Add a multiple-row table for multiple questions. Now you’ve got multiple answers right next to their answers. Perfect!
One last tip: If you like options 2 & 3, but you don’t like seeing the question in the table, you can handle it like this:
- Highlight all of the question cells.
- Click the dropdown in the top right of the topmost cell.
- Select the option that highlights all of the boundaries in that column.
- Change the boundaries to 0-point thickness (or make them white).
- Highlight all of the answer cells.
- Click the dropdown in the top right of the topmost cell.
- Select the option that highlights all of the boundaries in that column.
- Change the boundaries to 1-point thickness (or make them black).
