Survey Lab

I haven't done too much in my time as a teacher with surveys, but I am glad that this lab came along because soon I will need to. My district uses a pretty detailed evaluation system, and for it I had to make several goals. One of my goals requires that I solicit parent and student responses, which is to say this experience will come in handy.

Anyways, I had my 7th grade technology class take the general survey that was required. I used Google to make the survey. Here is a screenshot:

As far as student responses were concerned, my results followed this basic trend:

• Students tended to reply that they learn about computers and technology in school and in my classroom. Obviously, this is a self fulfilled prophecy in that my class is a technology course lol.
• All students felt comfortable using computers in order to complete school work. Again, this is a result of the fact that we are two months into the semester, and we work on our computers ever single day. 
• One student said they did not have internet at home, five said they had internet but didn't know much about it, and the remaining students responded that they had high speed internet.

Generally felt comfortable and familiar enough to:

• Send and receive email
• Write first drafts on a computer
• Edit your papers using a computer
• Open files on a server or network
• Find information on the internet
• Create or contribute to a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook
• Play computer games 
• Work with spreadsheet/databases

Generally felt uncomfortable  and not familiar enough to:

• Create a Hyperstudio or PowerPoint presentation
• Create a Video
• Update your Blog 

Students confidence stems largely from use of computers (both laptop and desktops), cell phones, Ipods, and video games.

Using Google forms was an okay experience. It would have been better if the questions were different. The format of the questions was not always a great pairing with Google Forms. For example, to do questions 7, 8 and 10 I had to make separate questions for each topic. This resulted in my quiz looking tremendously long. I later did some research and discovered that I could have made it as a grid to solve this dilemma, but it was after I had my students take the quiz. I guess that means it isn't so much a problem with Forms as much as the question instructions which probably were not written with forms in mind, but rather forms just being suggested at a later time. I think this experience has enough positives that I will certainly try using it in the future though, but probably never for actual assessments.