Conducting a Classroom Survey

Well, conducting a classroom survey can sometimes be a little hard to organise. After the initial designing - such as working out what your going to collect data and questions to ask there is the calculations.

Well this is where a handy ICT called SurveyMonkey comes into play. Survey Monkey is a fee online survey tool that enables you to ask up to 100 people to complete an online survey form. It can be integrated inside school intranets, blogs or personal websites. There is a premium account which enables you to have up to 1000 people taking part in your survey.

An example of a survey could be one about radio and the progress of users switching to internet radio.

For example here is a survey I created for my podcasting website. Here is a link to information about the survey. This survey was put together to gather information from a selection of 100 people about the radio stations they listen to. The ultimate idea is to understand whether an Internet Radio station is viable.

Below is an image of what Survey Monkey can do

The survey above took about 5 minutes to design and create. However in a classroom concept when teaching about surveys there are a couple of good pointers to keep in mind.

1. Have a Learner profile of the students in your class. This way you have an understanding of what the students in your calls already know. Come up with an interesting topic that is relevant to the student's learning. Use information from the essential leanings.
2. Start teaching what you've planned. For students to gain an understanding of survey monkey it might be helpful if you could get students to participate in a survey first. You can then use the survey they participated in to make the information more relevant.
3. Ask students to start planning their surveys. Group work might be helpful if the task requires extensive work. Once planning has been completed students can create a free account at SurveyMokey
4. Once all students have participated in each others surveys the results can be analysed. The students can use a program such as Excel or Powerpoint to create a graph.
5. The information that is in graph forms could then be present by students as an oral presentation to demonstrate their understanding. This would address the CCP of Numeracy as well as ICT.

Well that's a very brief overview of conducting a classroom survey as an activity for students. Further activities that can be done is if your survey is something that the school would benefit from. For example if the topic of your survey was, "The amount of hours children watch TV". The results gathered from this survey could be displayed in the school newsletter advising parents of the effects of to much TV stimulation.

Remember a good teacher is someone that can teach well and use ICTs to enrich their students' learning.