Survey Monkey
While I'm enjoying my very humid summer break I'm also reflecting on this great year of teaching for myself. One great tool that I used throughout the year was survey monkey! I found a variety of different uses for it..jpg)
Survey monkey let's you give anonymous surveys to others and than gather their feedback in a nice organized fashion. So if you are a data tracking nerd like myself, look no further!I used it on a regular basis as an exit slip for different lessons. Although you do not get to see who is struggling with what it still is a nice indicator of how your class is doing overall. The reason I chose this tool over other formative assessment tools such as exittix or Socratic is because it was easier to build and easier for the students to access the site as well.
Disability Support Groups
Another valuable way to use the survey monkey website is to show data to your colleagues and administrators. At my school this year we found that many of our students felt bad or mistreated because they had a disability. Now this is in a high school setting where many students, whether or not if they have a disability, have self-esteem issues. My social worker and speech therapist and I thought that we should look into creating a support group for the students. This would be a safe environment where the students can discuss how they feel and specifically about how they deal with living with a disability. To be able to get the time and budget to create a support group, we first needed to show data the supported our claim. I than had all of the students in the center-based program that I work in take a survey about how they feel about having a disability and if they would find a support group helpful, in an anonymous setting. After they took the surveys, my PLC group and I reviewed the data and did see that there was a need that was not being addressed. I than took it to my administrator and he approved of us creating a support group for the students. If I did not use something like survey monkey to support my claim, it could have been much harder for me to get the ball rolling on such a project.Our plans after this are to have the students help facilitate the support group and guide the conversations. Myself or the social worker will attend each meeting and like other support groups they will be a safe place where people are asked not to share others personal stories. We are hoping to get guest speakers to come and speak to our students as well.
The support group will be starting up this fall hopefully, so I will definitely have another blog about it once it is up ad running!
Quote of the day: Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre.
-Gail Goodwin
