Signing Up Participants through Google Docs

I’m running several conferences and programs at my school these days, and I’ve wound up using the FORMS tool at Google Docs to create the sign-up sheets.  It’s great for me — I’ve turned the job of collecting names and numbers and grade levels and all the technical information I need about each student and adult to a computer.  I’ve also turned over the job of keeping the list organized and readable to the computer, too.  And the job of signing up is now in the hands of adults and students — and part of their job in this is to be responsible enough to sign up, if they want to do it.

Any other readers use Google Docs this way? Any others worry about providing information to Google in this fashion?  I have to say, without a tool like this, we’d have a great deal of difficulty organizing this kind of internal conference.

Update: I hadn’t realized this for some reason, but this is my 2,400th post ever.  One of my new goals is to make it to 2500 posts by the end of school.

Reading the US Constitution

It’s that time of year when my U.S. history class reads the Constitution.  We’re not through the Articles yet (haven’t even started the Bill of Rights), and it was heavy going for a while.  But now they have enough grounding in the document that the crazy hypothetical questions are starting to come out:

• Hypothetically, my aunt was accused of child abuse for not letting her son go to school. Then she moved to Arizona before the case went to trial.  What does the constitution say about that?  (Article IV, section 2)
• Does Texas have to recognize a gay wedding in Connecticut (Article IV, Section 1)
• Can the Coast Guard arrest me on my boat, when I’m just in Connecticut waters (Article III, section 2)
• Will Newt Gingrich be able to fire ‘activist judges’ if he becomes President (Article III, section 1)
• Is this new “indefinite detention” law legal (Article I, section 9)
• Can Connecticut make me king — not of the US, but just of here? (Article IV, section 4)
• Can Congress just tax the Millionaires who live in New York State? (Article I, section 9)
• Could Congress just give the Internet to the Postal Service to run it? (Article I, section 8)
• Can a Congressman or Senator also be Ambassador to Ireland? (Article I, section 6)

And more…

What are your favorite theoretical questions for the U.S. Constitution?  It occurs to me that I should make up a group of worksheets consisting of nothing other than weird hypothetical cases, hand them out at the start of the week or two we read the US Constitution, and then ask them to turn in the worksheets at the end of the week.