Sharing the Addiction

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.

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