Surveys and survey results

For one of our assignments in CEP812 we were to use online survey tools to gather information about technology use. I chose to use Survey Monkey. I sent the survey to the 5th grade here at American School of Warsaw. Approximately 46 students took the survey (which can be seen here) and here are the results (I am not showing all the results, just the ones I found interesting AND I apologize for the size, because I am not a paying member of Survey Monkey I had to crunch the numbers using Excel, maybe they should think about giving teachers some sort of free services like a lot of the other great internet tools out there). I changed some of the questions on the survey as we have a one to one laptop program at this school.

In this questions you can see that mostly the kids learn new things at school (67%) or at home (27%). so perhaps the one to one program is working after all....

How often do you use a computer to....... In the everyday category the winners were 1). Sending and receiving emails (48.9&) and 2). finding information on the internet (60%). Was this surprising? Nope. In the 5th grade we are currently researching persuasive topics using our school databases, but we often "google" our questions, anything from converting km to mi to "Are crickets incomplete or complete metamorphosis?". And email is big here too. My students communicate with me via email if they are sick, if they have a question about the homework, I send them links, Google docs, surveys.... What was surprising was that 30% of my fifth graders never used Facebook, I assumed many more were on it.

I liked this question.How well are you able to: In the "Really Good" category there were a lot of winners: send and receive email (56.5%), finding information on the internet (34.8%)and ..... playing computer games (30.4%)! What was interesting however, was what they did not feel they could confidently do (marked with a "Not Very Good" or "OK"), perhaps we need to brush up on these items: creating videos, working with spreadsheets/databases, editing their papers and creating a Powerpoint. I know for a fact that I am guilty of shunning the Powerpoint, much preferring the newer methods of Prezi, Slideshare, or VoiceThread. We discussed this in our team meeting and found it funny that we had veered away from the standard forms of presentation and relied much more heavily upon internet resources or just plain pure speeches (we do a huge speech unit). Should we change? Up for debate.

When you are using a computer (instead of paper and pencil) to do your school work do you: the most interesting item from this was "Get more confused when using a computer to" a whopping 58.7% picked sometimes. I expected less from my students, but here is the proof in the pudding, these little netbooks still confuse the issue sometimes.....