The display of the view is a matter of styling. You can adjust the style by adding preferred styles to the table either directly in the html or via the editor controls.
According to the screenshot of the block installation problem, it seems that you tried to install the dataform module under blocks. The block plugin is called dataform_view.
Which Moodle version do you have?
The Dataform versions are aligned with Moodle versions so if your Moodle version is 2.6 then you need Dataform 2.6 and if 2.7 then Dataform 2.7 and so on.
To begin with, try to create a very simple Dataform and add entries. For that you only need to create 1 default view. So:
If that works you can try again and this time before you add the view, add a textarea field. Then when you create the view it will include the field and when you add a new entry it will display the input box.
When this simple scenario works you can start taking it to the next level.
Not sure that an extra system for this activity is necessary. System transitions usually create more confusion than clarity. With the Dataform it should be very very simple to create the application within Moodle. The entries could be as simple as 1 textarea field (with editor enabled). You can create two views, one for a summary list view where the teacher could view in a glance multiple entries and when they were last modified, and the other full content. The latter view you can populate to a block in the student profie page or my moodle page.
For time/date range you can add in a filter a search criterion on the target time field such as
IS BETWEEN <time> .. <time>
For example if you want to find only entries in which the event year is 2013 the search criterion would be
IS BETWEEN 2013-1-1 .. 2014-1-1
hth
Ah, well, not possible. You can try the Dataform module addon which offers richer search functionality including multiple search filters.