Adding forms is fairly easy to do, but it can be a little difficult to work out where you need to go at first. Forms can be a great way to gather information or collect responses from parents. They’re a simple tool with genuinely hundreds of uses.
To start with, we’re going to need to create the forms in the Jotter management area.
This will bring up the form management page. Two are created for you by default, for contacting the school and for reporting absences – we’ve found these two can be very helpful to schools on their own. Let’s have a look at how to create your own form though – click Add Form at the top of the box and you’ll see this screen.
Note that what we’re creating here is more of a “container” for the form questions to sit in. Here’s an explanation of the fields:
- Name – The name of the form, only used internally
- Introduction Text – Text to appear before the form, to tell people what it is
- Additional Action – Whether you want the form to email people with completed responses
- Email – The address to which completed forms should be sent
Click Add Form and it’ll be added to the list of forms from before, alongside Contact and Absence. Click the link marked Fields to the right of your new form name, and you’ll get this screen – note that this is one of the prepopulated ones, if it’s a new form it will be blank.
All you can do here is click Add Field, which brings up the fields page. This is where we start to actually build our form, and there’s a number of types of field you can create. It’s important for your data that the proper categorisation is used:
- Text Field – plaintext, such as a person’s name
- Phone – A phone number – it’s important this isn’t text or numeric in order to keep the leading 0 in phone numbers
- Email – An email address
- URL – Somebody’s website
- Numeric – Raw numerical data
- Text area – A larger, multi-line box for more detailed feedback
- Dropdown – A list of options – specify them in the third box which will appear, separating them with commas only (not spaces)
- Date – A date box
- Captcha – A field used to ensure a human is completing the form (and not a web-crawling robot)
- Radio – similar to dropdown, let people choose an option from a list
The Required checkbox will specify whether or not that field needs to be filled for the form to be submitted. Once you’re happy with your field, click Add Field. You’ll need to do this a few times to build your form out, with items such as name, phone number, email address etc – it’s up to you what you add!
You can see a preview of what a complete form looks like by clicking Fields next to the Absence or Contact form, as shown above.
To get the data out of your forms, you’ll need to click on Submissions, which will let you filter them and download them as a CSV spreadsheet if you need to.
Now let’s put the form on your website – you should be familiar with how this works by now, but here it is!
Go to your website, click Insert Item then select Form. Choose where you want it to be. You’ll then be asked to insert a form – you can also manage your forms from this box. You can change this later from the grey dropdown at the top of the window.
And that’s it, you should now have a form on your website!
