Week 5 - Survey Monkey

This week I want to look at the uses of Survey Monkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/) for classroom activities. Below are some questions of a survey that I made for a lesson plan. They are asking about nationality/race, religion, and language and were the start of a lesson investigating identity.


After getting students to think about themselves and their families, the survey asked about bullying and being bullied.
The aim of this survey was to get students thinking about the sorts of themes and issues to be covered in the lesson. It's a quick and easy way to activate students' schemas about a particular topic. A survey could also be devised as a getting-to-know the students exercise. Instead of getting them to write down on paper, the students could complete a survey about their likes and dislikes, what books, music, sport, etc. that they enjoy. A Survey Monkey survey could be used at the end of a lesson to consolidate the lesson. It could be a quick multiple-choice quiz to integrate new vocabulary introduced in the lesson.

You could also devise a survey to get feedback on a lesson, an activity, or on the teacher's performance. It can also be used in advance of a lesson to gauge interest in a subject, and find out what activities would most appeal to the students. I thought you could also make a survey to ask students how they're feeling at the beginning of a lesson - hungry, tired, angry, happy, etc. It could let the teacher know if half the class are tired, and therefore won't respond too well to a long writing exercise. Maybe a quick, fun activity would get the energy levels up.

There are a range of answer types that can be used for a survey. They can be 'Tick one answer' questions, multiple-choice, writing a comment, 'Yes or No' questions, open-ended questions, etc. It lends itself to a wide range of language choices. The free version of Survey Monkey restricts you to only 10 questions, but that is enough for a quick 5-10 minutes survey in class.

After the students have completed a survey, the results are available for the teacher to analyse. These can also be used as part of the lesson to illustrate a point. The data can be exported to Excel to create a chart or graph (to create one in Survey Monkey involves paying for services).