JotForm in the Classroom
An example of how to use JotForm in education for lessons, surveys, and assessments.
I recently had the task of teaching my fourth-grade math students a lesson about sales tax. Not the process of calculating it — that lesson won't come for a couple of years. They were simply learning the concept of sales tax and its inclusion into the final total. I had the perfect activity planned, but it lacked one essential tool: a clean and easy-to-use online sales tax calculator that did not give the final total. That was a task my students were supposed to perform. JotForm provided the missing tool and allowed me to present the activity as planned.
The sales tax lesson clearly lent itself to real-life application, and I was thrilled to find that a local retailer stocked tablets of the actual Guest Checks used in restaurants to take customer orders. The students could use the Guest Checks, along with a restaurant menu, to take each other’s orders and calculate the subtotal. Then they would use the online sales tax calculator, add the tax to the subtotal to find the final total, and calculate change back from a $20 bill. Everything hinged on the sales tax calculator, which I was able to create easily using JotForm.
I had used JotForm for registrations, permissions, and t-shirt orders, but it never had occurred to me to use it in my lessons. With the friendly drag-and-drop form builder, I created a simple form with three fields.
Those three fields included text boxes for tax rate and subtotal, and one widget: a form calculation to compute the sales tax amount. There was no need to include a “Submit” button because the calculated field updated instantly and I wasn't collecting any data.
Could this possibly be the first time JotForm was used so successfully while collecting no information whatsoever?
Creating the calculated field was no more difficult than writing a simple formula. Including a dollar sign at the beginning enabled the tax amount to be displayed properly as dollars and cents.
The form was incredibly simple and clean, yet precisely the right tool for the job.
How long did the entire process take? Just under three minutes.
The realization that custom online calculators can be created so easily has opened my mind to the idea of using JotForm in education. It could be incorporated into lessons, surveys, and assessments — the possibilities are endless!
