creating surveys

I've already been asked whether it's possible to create surveys within blog groups. The person who asked this question was specifically thinking of the Technology Survey I had you complete at the beginning of the semester. The simple answer is: Yes! Do you need to create a survey of some sort? The simple answer is: No! I'm simply providing this as an option that some of you may want to use.

If your group wants to create a survey to collect data from others in our class then this is simple to do with a bit of help from my part. If you want to collect data from people outside the class, that's doable, but it takes a bit more work on my part (as I don't want "outsiders" accessing our course website).

The trick to all of this lies in the web-goodness provided by Google Docs. At this location you can create shareable documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and (most importantly for us) forms. Here's how to select a new form:

Here's what it would look like at your first step in creating a form:

Notice that you can create a mixture of different types of questions (paragraph text, multiple choice, checkboxes, choose from a list, and scale (1-n).

You can create as many questions as you want of these varying types. Notice also (see red arrow to bottom of image) that when you create a form (or survey, really the same thing) then Google Docs automatically creates a spreadsheet linked to the form. This is a very elegant and powerful feature.

To get this all down right is fairly straightforward, but I suggest any group wanting to create a survey contact me so we can collaboratively work on the mechanics of posting the survey and collecting the results.