CED 540 - Week 3

This week we got our usual guided practice worksheet along with a larger survey assignment.

The guided practice worksheet revisited the concepts of mean, standard deviation, and range. I believe the goal of the assignment was to illustrate that we need to look at the range and standard deviation of a sample in order to truly understand the information that we are trying to analyze. This is an important concept and I will try to keep this in mind when I am evaluating student data or when I am having students evaluate any data that they collect.

We also had a group survey assignment. We needed to create a survey, collect data, analyze it, and present our results. This week my group came up with a topic and created the survey. We decided to keep the topic and our questions simple so that it would not be a burden for others to participate. We chose to collect data about a summer picnic. I currently shared it through facebook and I believe my group members are doing the same. We will collect data over the next couple of weeks. Afterwards, we will analyze it and create a visual representation of our data for our presentation. This is an interesting assignment because it gives us creative freedom and allows us to use the skills that we are learning about in this class. I embeded our survey below. Feel free to add your input.

CED 540 - Week 2

This week we completed another guided practice worksheet. The worksheet looked into mean, median, mode, standard deviation, range, and skew. We looked at data and interpreted the results and we also did our own calculations. This was a little hard at first but eventually I got the hang of it. I can see how these calculations will be beneficial when using student data. I can use these to truly identify how my classes are performing based on their assessments.

We also had to look at survey tools. We looked at Captera which is a survey software site that helps users determine the type of survey they need and the software needed to create a survey. This would be very beneficial for collecting data and it saves a lot of research and time.

We also looked at some survey creation software, such as surveymonkey and zoomerang. I don't have any direct experience creating surveys with this software, but my school district has used zoomerang to collect data. It was an easy way to provide my opinion on the topic. I have used other survey tools like polleverywhere and the smart response system. I am interested in seeing how all of these will compare.