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Online Form or Worksheet

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by ckoeppel

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Hello,

I am looking for some assistance on the creation of a specific online form or worksheet. The Dirksen Center is expanding its site for kids -- Congress for Kids -- by adding a "citizenship" thread to its existing content. What we would like to do is offer an online form or worksheet that several students in a classroom can complete individually online and submit to their teacher's e-mail address. So, for example, let's say a classroom has 20 students, each with their own computer. Each student will complete the form or worksheet online and submit their work to their teacher's e-mail address. The teacher would then receive 20 individual forms.

Here's an example of one online form or worksheet:

Worksheet: Acting Like a Citizen
Follow the directions below:

Free Choice
In the text box below, name a situation or a time that you would be free to talk any time you wanted.

[Text box]

Laws or Rules
In the text box below, name a situation or a time when you would get in trouble if you talked.

[Text box]

Social Responsibilities
In the text box below, name a situation or a time that you would be free to talk, but it would be better not to.

[Text box]

Either print your work to discuss with your teacher, or enter your teacher's email address in the text box below and using the examples you have just entered, discuss with your teacher and classmates the differences between choosing freely, obeying a law or rule, and behaving responsibly.

Teacher's Email: [Note: Students will enter their teacher's e-mail address here and submit it for discussion or grading]

We have hundreds to thousands of users for this site and we aren't quite sure about the coding for this particular type of HTML or PHP page. Is there anyone familiar with this sort of coding, and if so, can you please provide some guidance on completing this sort of online form or worksheet so it will function as we would like it to?

Thanks in advance.

Cindy Koeppel
The Dirksen Congressional Center

3 replies

by bschaettle

Cindy,

I think that Adobe Acrobat offers the functionality you're after, but I'm not entirely sure. I seem to recall that you can build a form in Acrobat and then post it on a website in such a way that both the form and the information typed onto it are sent to the recipient.

Another possibility would be to have a cgi script process the online form data and build a formatted HTML email that would mimic the online form, and have the typed responses embedded in it.

A third possibility would be to use a database to store the typed responses and display them to teachers, but then you get into storage and user management issues. However, it offers the advantage of not clogging small school email servers.

Another potential downside to the email-based solutions is that some students will inevitably mis-type their teacher's email address and their work will go off into the ether and be lost lost as soon as they hit the "submit" button.

by sgt_shultz

can you ask this exact question of whomever hosts your site? this is commonly done, but to know what programming method to use, you need to know what your web server supports.
cgi is almost for sure supported. they may have sample scripts or other assistance for you. or once you find out what you are looking for you can google to find a sample. i would try asp for starters. do you have rights to ftp files to your webserver? (are you the web admin?)

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