Decision Making - Week 3

Survey says...

That is the theme this week. I never knew so much thought and planning had to go into a survey. It is a lot more difficult than I thought.

After our group decided on the topic and our participants it was time to put the survey together. Much harder than predicted. I have created a number of surveys in Survey Monkey for our school but I never created the survey from scratch. It was always done by someone else and I just put it in the system. I thought I had a good handle on it until I started putting it in a document. Then everything fell apart.

Hopefully things will come together as we talk about it more in our group. I am looking forward to seeing the results and starting the process of analysis.

Decision Making - Week 2

Pirates and monkeys. That is what will stick with me most this week. Despite my lack of enthusiasm, the statistics part of the class has not been that bad and I am starting to understand things a bit more.

The assignment that took the most of my time was the survey comparison. One of the sites that caught my eye was Survey Pirate. I happened to see that title in the list and had to check it out. After all, last Sunday was International Talk Like A Pirate Day! (Everyone knows about this, right? Was I the only one celebrating?)

After visiting the site, not only was I disappointed that there were no pirates but the software was not that good. You can't judge a book by its cover, right?

The other site I checked out was Survey Monkey. I had used this site in the past but have been off of it for about 2 years. I was surprised at all of the new features that were added. I was also surprised that, after adding these features, the price of the site did not go up. There were lots of great enhancements and the price is great (only $200/year for unlimited responses).

I really enjoyed the Capterra site as well. What a great resource for finding any sort of software that you may need. Who knew that there were so many choices!

Decision Making - Week 1

Statistics. Not my favorite subject. I was a poor math student in high school and college. It just does not interest me unless it has to do with physics, which I find fascinating. The process of coming up with statistics is very boring to me. So, to say the least, I am not looking forward to the math part of this class.

One thing that I do like is to look at numbers and analyze them. Numbers can tell a story. When it comes to statistics at work, it my job is to export data, like grades, attendance, and test scores from our student information system and get them to others to compute and analyze.

I am hoping that this class will provide me a better toolset for dealing with statistics. I would like to know how to better analyze the statistics and put them to good use. Our school has been doing data driven instruction for the last couple of years. This is the type of class that I need to better understand that process.