Creating+a+Teacher+Survey

Creating a teacher technology survey was an excellent experience. The intent of the survey is to find out what level of skills teachers have in using the two district required programs for the 2010-2011 school year, Moodle and ActivInspire. The goal is to enable the Instructional Technologist to personalize the teacher’s professional development plans.

Moodle is an open source course management system, teachers will be expected to use in conjunction with the mini-laptops to develop lessons utilizing technology. The eighth grade teachers received training in Moodle last year as they were the only grade level with the mini-laptops. ActivInspire is the program used to create interactive presentations for display and use on the whiteboards that are installed in each classroom. All teachers received a one-day training session on ActivInspire at the beginning of last year. There were no other formal trainings with the software. There was video training available online, but this was not widely advertised. Most teachers did not create their own presentations for classroom use, a few downloaded pre-made presentations for the company’s web site. It is likely that most teachers forgot their training, since it went unused for the year.

I created two versions of the survey, one in word and one utilizing ActivInspire. The presentation format will allow teachers to use a student response system to make their choices and can be administered to several people simultaneously. An additional benefit was that it gave me more practice with using the program. I would have created a version in Moodle as well, but I do not have the level of access needed to make the results available to the entire faculty to take the survey, or to give the correct people access to the results. There were challenges involved in creating the survey. One was my lack of experience in creating presentations with the ActivInspire software. The other was generating questions for two systems that I am not familiar with, I admit to relying heavily on my mentor to help with this issue.