Project 3

Identify an Instructional Challenge

In my experience as a teacher, one of the greatest challenges in the educational system today is that students do not feel that they are participating in the learning process. Many teachers lecture information regardless of students’ desires and concerns regarding the content area. Additionally, many teachers repeat lesson plans every semester with no regard for each student or individual class’s need. This is contrary to what research advises teachers to do. In a book published in 2004, John MacBeth and Lejf Moos argue that students would perform better if their voice was heard in a democratic learning environment (“Democratic Learning: A Challenge to School Effectiveness”, 2004). This enables students to voice their opinions and share with educators how they see the world. If this cannot be done, students are likely to mentally “check out” of the learning process.

Technology Solution

To give students the opportunity to voice their opinions, a teacher may utilize an on-line survey system. For this project, I will be using Survey Monkey. This will not only allow students the opportunity to express their desires and concerns but it will help the educator see trends as the semester progresses. It will also show them how classes differ from one another.

This is a link to my video on youtube.com regarding SurveyMonkey

Reflection

To begin, I searched for different survey resources on-line. Survey Monkey came highly recommended by its users so I decided to use it. I learned about the website by trial and error. The more a tried, the more I learned. As a result, I learned all about the different options that are available in types of questions, how the survey is retrieved from its users, how information is reported, and so one. While the trial version was really beneficial, there were other options that seemed more advanced in the Pro option. This option requires payment for the service but offered tools such as reporting data via Microsoft excel, printing surveys, and unlimited amounts of questions per survey. All in all, both the pro product and the basic (free) version seemed to meet the needs of this educational challenge.