Daily Archives: May 5, 2007

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It's getting late and I have a more substantial post in the pipeline but I can't let the week end without a reference to my class's use of SurveyMonkey this week as part of our Maths program. The topic was collecting and analysing data and we had just starting contemplating what our peer review of The Horizon Project was going to look like. Of the six major trends from the Horizon Report, the one that got my class most excited was the focus on Mobile Phones. Interestingly, in the timeliness that only the online world can deliver, Darren Draper has just blogged on the use of Mobile Phones in the classroom and is looking for some information on mobile phone penetration in parts of the world beyond the US. (See, my whining has made him wary!) He might be interested in our data although in the hands of 10/11 year olds, it may muddy his research rather than clarify.

I was very impressed how the site handled the traffic from an entire class at the same time. I created a class account and everyone just logged in and started to create theirĀ  surveys straightaway without any issues. The application itself was very intuitive for students of this age group and everything saved as they went so work was not lost. The tricky part came when it was time to create an e-mail link and paste it in their EdMail - that was more an issue with mis-spelt e-mail addresses than anything else. And when the results came flowing in, it was great to throw the results up on the interactive whiteboard foBut full credit to SurveyMonkey as a useful online tool. I made a class account and we could house everyone's survey at once and not only that, kids could all work on their own survey at the same time without any hassle. They found the toolr a class analysis. Super tool - the class found data gathering via survey to be totally engaging. Thumbs up!

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