Survey Monkey to the Rescue

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Oct 29 2007

Posted at 11:18 pm under Data Collection

Well, it is that time of year again where I think about how to collect data from my teachers. I have just paid to upgrade my Survey Monkey account again for the month which is a very reasonable $30 US. By upgrading, I get access to a far more comprehensive set up options such as having branching surveys (where respondents get different questions as a result of their answer choices) and the ability to filter responses by questions (eg look at results by filtering by school). I can also have more than 10 questions which is one of the limits of the free account.

Having used this tool at the middle of the year, I was amazed at how much easier it was to focus on the analysis of the data I collected rather spending hours collating it. I reverted back to paper evaluations for our cluster Expo thinking this might be easier for some cluster teachers and soon realised that this was not something that I will want to repeat again. The number of hours I had to spend on data entry was into the double figures which does not help you to gain any insight from the data. It seems a no-brainer to use Survey Monkey where the tools do all this for you.

A couple of classrooms are experimenting with Survey Monkey to find out information from other students in the school during Social Studies and Health topics. It is a free tool for up to ten questions and the exercise of designing questions correctly to get the information you need is certainly a higher order activity. We are always wanting to have our children spend more time on analysis of data and this is how ICT can provide a wonderful way to do this.

4 responses so far

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4 Responses to “Survey Monkey to the Rescue”

Richardon 30 Oct 2007 at 7:58 am 1

Hi, I have used survey monkey a couple of times with the free version, is the paid one really worth the money? I don’t mind paying $30 but with buying licences for all my software trying to rationalise down to what we really need, or do you think this is an essential cluster tool?
Suzie Vesperon 30 Oct 2007 at 8:50 am 2

This is an essential tool for what we are trying to do at cluster level. Without the upgrade, I’d have to spend a LOT of time trying to separate out the results by school so that I could give them their own results back (if it was even possible) whereas with the upgrade, all I have to do is filter the results by the question on school. Takes two seconds and is well worth the $30 just for this alone. I only upgrade for the month I need to do the survey in and then downgrade in-between. The survey stays in the free account so I don’t have to recreate it when I upgrade the next time.
Richardon 30 Oct 2007 at 9:49 am 3

Cheers Suzie. Will do, in fact found your survey on interact and might adapt for now and see hoe it goes with these two schools.
Rachel Boydon 03 Nov 2007 at 12:13 pm 4

Yes, Paul Potaka, my principal, but also our facilitator has been finding this essential too.
We got to look at some of the results from the principal and staff surveys just recently at a LT meeting… very interesting and good to use to see our “where to next aspect”.

Rachel