U033 – Submission form

Preliminary remark: this article presupposes that you are not working within an LMS integration, but that you are working with BookWidgets as a stand-alone program. LMS integrations, depending on the specific one you're using, may override the configuration of the submission form!

The submission form is the window that pops up when your students click either 'send', or the submit envelope icon in a widget. You can configure the options on this form by going into the configuration of your widget, Reporting > Submission form data.

On the submission form, there are five sections:

STUDENT NAME
STUDENT EMAIL
STUDENT ID
CLASS ID
TEACHER ID

Each of the fields has the following 3, identical options:

Visible: toggles whether the information will be visible on the submission form or not.
Editable: toggles whether the student can modify the text field on the submission form or not.

If visibility is disabled, this setting is irrelevant.

Default: defines a value that will already be filled in when the form appears.

If you enable both the Visible and Editable option while leaving the Default text field empty, then the field in question will allow free text input. There is, however, a very neat trick you can use, which is creating a dropdown menu for any of the fields.

How to set up a multiple-choice dropdown box

Enter multiple values, separated by a comma, in the default field. For example, if under Teacher ID, you enter both your own account name and that of a colleague, your students will be able to select whom they want to submit their answers to.

For this dropdown menu to work, it is important that both the Visible and Editable option are enabled.

Why is this useful?

The principal benefit of doing this is creating regularity and avoiding errors.

In the STUDENT NAME field, you might want to pre-input your student names so that for example, all your students' names appear as Surname-First name, and all are neatly capitalized. If you allow your students to write their own name, variances are bound to occur.
In the STUDENT EMAIL field, a preset list of email addresses can avoid typos, which could otherwise lead to errors when trying to send feedback to your students.
In the STUDENT ID field, a preset list of choices can avoid the same kind of mistakes, or you could obligate students to enter a value of a certain format.
In the CLASS ID field, going for a multiple-choice option can be very useful if for example, you teach multiple classes and use the same widget in both. The students can then simply choose the class they are in, ensuring that your results will be correctly grouped in the Review section of your account later!
In the TEACHER ID, as shown in the screenshot above, enter multiple teacher account names if for example you co-teach the same subject with a colleague, and both use the same widget for your students. Allowing free text input here is bound to create typos, resulting in the loss and/or mixup of student results.

💡 When using the Teacher ID > Default field, we advise you use your BookWidgets username rather than your account's email address. This is because if you change your BookWidgets account's email address, which may be the case if you change schools for example, the receiver of the submissions for all widgets that have the old email address in it, will suddenly become an invalid value, prompting an error message when students try to submit their answers. By using your username, which you are less likely to change, you will prevent this problem. You can change both in your account settings.