Survey Monkey
Title/Name of Resource: Survey Monkey
Topic: Evaluation/ Assessment
Source/Author: www.surveymonkey.com
Intended Purpose:
Survey Monkey is a great tool for creating and administrating quick surveys, collecting and analyzing data.
Intended Audience:
Teachers, administrators, teacher leaders.
Resource Requirements:
This is a web application that can be used on any computer that has access to the Internet.
The use of this tool is free if you want to use basic features. The free version is limited to 10 questions, but you can easily turn 10 questions into 100 by being creative with how you design your questions (i.e. matrix or multipart questions). The free version can only collect 100 responses, which might be sufficient for many uses. When using the free version you will notice that that several operations (such as exporting to Excel) are disabled and require the Premium Paid version. The free version is plenty useful as is, but if you project requires more than 100 responses and large amounts of questions, than the $19.95 a month fee seems well worth the hours of time you will save using a tool such as this.
Justification:
This resource can be used for collecting data and creating assessments in ways that would have been possible or would have been cost-prohibitive before. I’ve included several examples here of how it might be used including this Student Self Assessment of the Tech GE’s. (or perhaps Teachers).
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=369362136324
(it’s a copy of the original.. feel free to take it, your info will not end up in our data.)
I’ve also used this tool several times to gather information from both students and teachers. One use in particularly proved very helpful in helping teachers understand the “digital native” concept. I have heard many times teachers comment on how they don’t want to give a homework assignment that assumes a student has access to computers, because so many don’t have this type of access. Using survey monkey we were able to create and administer a survey that provided valuable data that even in this district with high free and reduced lunch, less than 10% of our students did not have access to a computer at home and most of those had Internet access. http://www.surveymonkey.com/Report.asp?U=181667674077
Showing this information in forms of concrete data, helped us move on from a speculation stage to an “aha” moment for many and helped us Change some of the Assumptions and Questions.
Another way to use this tool is to populate a database. In 10 minutes I can have a survey designed that actually collects important information that I’d like in database format. I then use the export feature to get the information in a format that I can import into a database.
For example, here is an old survey we used to collect information about individuals who were going to be part of a tech integration workshop. Note that we asked for names here because we wanted the database records to correspond to specific individuals.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=507851253501
(Don’t click submit on this one)
This Sample survey was used to help raise awareness about the content of the Tech GE’s when many educators were unfamiliar with them. There is a big difference between asking someone to READ the GE’s and asking them to participate in an interactive activity that requires reading new content. It’s not only students who are screaming “Engage me or Enrage me” (Mark Prensky)
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=428891198738
One cool thing about these surveys is that they can be shared easily. If I create a survey and you want to use it, Survey Monkey allows me to send the survey to your survey monkey account so you can benefit from my work (colleagueship)
Even though I know how to do this with HTML and Scripting, the speed and ease of use makes the concept of using the web for data collection a reality for small projects as more sophisticated ones.
Of course, getting the students involved in using such a tool would meet several Tech GE’s and provide fertile ground for tech integration.
