I was just feeling really good about getting my survey designed and ready to post when I realized a potential problem. First about the process, I created it with Surveymonkey. The whole survey took a couple of hours to make because I started looking at the various question types. In the end I just decided it would be easier to just stick to the same format for questions. Then I realized as I was ready to add another question that the free version restricts you to 10 questions. They couldnt' have told me that before I wrote the whole survey?

Then, as I was about to celebrate getting this completed I realized that this way of collecting surveys will not allow me to look at my subgroups. Prior to making the survey I had labored over two choices for looking at my special learners- either put a question in the survey about it or have the kids put in their names and I would know who was in what subgroup. I had decided to go with names because this way there would be no issue over confidentiality or other questions. Unfortunately, now that my survey is created it appears there is not a place for entering your name.

My question to the group is this, do I go back and add a question that asks students to check which groups they are a part of OR do I find a service that will allow me to put in names for the survey so that I can disaggregate these students after the survey has been taken?

The question of will I get better responses by allowing students to remain nameless. Will they feel more able to give an honest answer? I wonder about this. I would welcome other people's thoughts about it. I also plan to do some searching about writing and administering surveys to see if the experts out there may have some advice.

Another question that has arisen as I have begun to create the survey is filtering. The free version of Surveymonkey does not allow you to filter the results. For example, I may want to filter out the special services students if I go with that type of identification in my survey. Adding another layer to this may be putting a question that asks about gender into the survey. That could be another filter for the results.

Amazing how new questions come up as you are going through the process. I am going to post a link to the survey so you all can check it out. Just don't actually take it because I don't want your data!

Click Here to take survey

The next step

The next step is creating my online survey and administering it to my classes. I think this will be a great way to collect the data and also break it down into sub groups. After investigating quite a few online survey sites I found Surveymonkey to be the best suited to my needs. It seems easy to use and they will allow me to post the survey on my website as a link. This is fantastic because I am still able to do the project without having official student emails.

The suggestion was brought up that I could interview students. This is a fantastic idea! I think the kids will enjoy being able to share what they think. Although, I believe I may have to obtain direct permission from parents for their child's video to be included in anything I share with my colleagues. Now my question is if I should use the video in addition to all my other data sources or remove one of them.

Thanks for the feedback to those who left comments and do in the future.

Hello all. I am not exactly sure if we are supposed to be writing only to our group or everyone. At any rate I have done a lot of preliminary work for my project so far. The first step was getting approval from my administration. Their main concern was the safety of what I was doing. They insisted upon using a protected blog so that only approved comments from people outside the group could be posted. I understand that concern. From what I understand the authors of the blog, i.e. my students will still be able to post and comment without having to be approved. I really hope I understood that correctly because approving 120 students posts and comments could become a bit overwhelming.

The next step was drafting the parent letter to go home. This letter explained the purpose of what I was doing with the students, how we would go about setting guidelines and obtained permission for each student to participate and be able to watch the movie and be videotaped. It took quite some time to make sure I had all of my students permission letters in. I invited parents to get in touch with me if they had any questions or concerns and there were only 2 out of 120 that had any questions. That surprised me quite a bit.

I have to wonder if the parents really read the whole letter through and understand exactly what we will be doing. Not that I think what we are doing is questionable but I could see how a parent would worry about safety for example. Yet, I have to say that based upon the school year so far we have a group of parents this year that are not really paying attention to details. We send home weekly progress reports of how the students are doing in every class and the parents just sign that they saw them without taking the time to really look and see what is happening with their child. I have a feeling that later down the line, once we get into this project some more concerns might pop up.

The letter to the parents included a few rules and basic guidelines that we will follow. In addition, a colleague of mine gave me the idea to have students make their own contract for rules and responsibilites with the blog. I am planning on using an outline of a contract and having the class tailor it based upon their discussion. I will guide them in the right direction. By having the students generate their own contract for the guidelines they will have more ownership.

The next step is working on the survey. I have some questions that I have put together but I am wanting some feedback as to whether or not the questions will provide the data I need to answer my big question. I plan to look at these in more detail over the week. I will try and post what I have so that my group may give me some feedback. After looking at several online survey sites I think I am going to use survey monkey. Any thoughts?