Starting To See Progress

The students worked project as scheduled in the last two class periods. The checklist is working to help the students know what they are supposed to do. We were also on one accord as a teaching team. A new student to our team found a great website to use for the project "by accident". I love it when that happens. Other teams were really getting into the creation of the menu and finding foods of other cultures. I am the tech resource teacher on the team so students came in and out of my room asking for help on creating the menu and some asked for help on search as well as if a particular food would be resonable to create in the cafeteria. From this point on the students will be recording all of their research and creating their products on the computer.

I had the awesome task of figuring out a new piece of software. I know I mentioned in a previous blog entry that I was deciding between using InspireData and an online survey. Well, the online surveys were not going to work. All of them were only free for the first 100 responses. After 100 you would have to pay. Also they did not give the students the opportunity to create the graphs. They created the graph of the results. Therefore, I decided to figure out how to use InspireData's new feature of an online survey.

Thanks to this blog, the product manager of the product contacted me about a week ago. Thanks to his help, I was able to better find the information that will help me create a survey that meets the types of questions I wanted the students to ask. I just finished creating the students survey and it was really easy. I did find out it would be important to write down the survey id and owner id it gives you when you go to publish the survey so that you can close the survey later. I am going to have to contact the product manager and see if it is a way to cancel the surveys I created by accident :).

So far it looks like it will be a great tool. The only downside is the students have the ability to retake the survey. I had to communicate to the english department to make sure the students do not take the survey twice and skew the numbers. The good news is the product manager listened to me about that being a great thing to turn off and it will be an option in the next release. I can't wait to see some of the preliminary results on Friday. I will be going through the interpretation of the data with the students next week. If you are intested in more information about InspireData, you can get it from www.inspiration.com.

Tomorrow we will be on a field trip. There are some students who are staying behind and will probably work some on the project. I will be checking with DeAnn(science) to see what occurs to report.