Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Survey solution for a student project?

A seventh grade student just came to me looking to electronically administer a survey to about 150 students. My first thought was a Google Form. The problem is that about 10 of her questions require the respondent to look at an image and select a multiple-choice, text answer. As far as I can tell, Google Forms does not support an image in the question. (I did find a reference to people editing the HTML of the form and hosting it elsewhere, but that is overly complicated for this case as I want a solution the student can own.)

We have Blackboard's course management system, but you can not link directly into a Blackboard survey (or even a particular course) in our system. Emailing students directions to go to Blackboard, login, select a specific course, and go to a particular survey are enough hurdles that many students probably won't bother to fill out this optional survey. The student doing the project would like to just send her prospective respondents a link, which seems the wise choice to me.

So the best solution I came up with so far is to use a Google Sites web page with an embedded Google Form. The Sites page will contain the 10 images in a 2 x 5 table at the top of the page. Each image will be labeled with a number:
Picture 1

The questions will then say something like "Identify the bird in Picture 1." If the embedded form is sized properly, I believe the images can stay on the screen while the survey requires scrolling through the questions.

What do you think?
I would be happy to hear suggestions for a different solution that would allow the image to be located right in the question. Please post a comment, reply via Twitter, or email me via campbb at d-e.org if you have a suggestion.
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Monday, May 10, 2010

HotW: Interview with William Kist, author of The Socially Networked Classroom

The book The Socially Networked Classroom by William Kist was recently been brought to my attention via a recommendation by Steve Hargadon. As my potential reading list outweighs my reading time, I plan to read the couple of chapters available via Google Books and listen to this interview with the author, which I can do during "down time" in the car, before I decide to buy it. (If there were an audio book, I would have probably already made that purchase.)

According to the forward, the book "asks us if the social interactivity of the Web -- Web 2.0 -- has transformed the way we 'do' school and then shows us, with care and specificity, the way to transform our schools."

So far, it looks promising.

This MP3 has been published by Steve Hargadon and/or Elluminate so they retain the rights to the recording, which appears to be All Rights Reserved due to a lack of any indication otherwise. I make no claim to the rights to use this file, am only linking to it, and will take down the link if asked to do so by the owner of the recording.
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