In this course, we will explore various technological applications, and many examples we will examine are not directly related to the ELA classroom. Your challenge as a student is to consider the applications and examples and then adapt the technology for your own classroom context rather than letting the technology drive your curriculum.
Surveys are the first of many applications we will explore. They are a terrific means of gathering information on your students. You might collect information ranging from their needs to their attitudes about a topic or text you want to incorporate into your ELA curriculum. They are also a terrific means of engaging your students in Web 2.0 technologies and in gathering data for their own research. I always like when I see teachers trying to integrate technology in their teaching. Here one high school business education teacher tries using surveys to engage his marketing students collecting data for their own research projects. As daunting as it may feel, you can even use surveys to gather anonymous information from students about your own teaching — like a course (or lesson) evaluation. Some teachers like Juan O’Shea use Survey Monkey to do just this as part of their on going professional development.
Survey Monkey is a semi-free online survey collection tool. By semi-free, I mean that there are small surveys you can create with it by opening a free account; however, to create longer, more complex surveys, you have to subscribe to the service. Survey Monkey also collects and analyzes the data for you, saving you and your students some work in the process of gathering information for a variety of purposes.
To explore and practice with Survey Monkey let’s do the following:
- Take the survey I created for this course
- Create your own survey on anything you want (consider interesting things you might want to learn about your classmates and/or me — not necessarily “English” related). Include at least five items in your survey. Also, try using three different question formats to “play” with the options available. For example, try not only using a multiple choice question but maybe adding an open-ended question and a Likert Scale question.
- Send the link to your survey to five classmates with whom I have grouped you on today’s class agenda and to me. To do this, copy the link by highlighting it and right clicking on it, then select “copy.” Through Vista, create an email message. Select the five classmates you are exchanging surveys with and me as recipients of your email. In the subject line of your email, write your last name and 3241 Survey (i.e., Dail 3241 Survey). In the body of the email, greet your classmates and me and kindly ask us to complete your survey. Then right click with your mouse and select paste; that should drop the link to your survey into the body of your email. Sign your name, and send the email. You need to do this to form the habit of writing a professional email with a greeting, directed content, and a closing. Develop these good technology habits now.
- Once you receive emails from your five classmates, follow the links (you will likely have to copy and paste them into your browser and then hit enter) to their surveys and respond to them.
- Once everyone you sent your survey to has responded to it, log back into Survey Monkey and select my surveys, then select the analyze results tab. Consider your results. What can you learn from this analysis? It may not be much in this informal survey, but how might such an analysis be useful to you as a teacher collecting information from you students, parents, and/or community? How might such an analysis be useful to you as a teacher collecting information on your own teaching? How might such an analysis be useful to your own students as they conduct their own research — research that is not always centered in the stacks of the library or the online search engine? Make some notes to share during our debriefing discussion.
