Statistics Week 3

This is one week when I would have had to eat a little crow if I had spoken to anyone about this week's article on preparing a survey.  After reading, it all seemed pretty pointless to me.  I thought it included the kind of unnecessary preparation steps that business-y types sit around in boardrooms and talk about while pretending words like "synergy" mean anything.  If I would have said that out loud, I would have been wrong.

As my group went through the steps, I quickly realized that if we just started randomly writing down questions, it would have been a mess.  As we were creating the questions, our focus slowly and subtly changed, and we went back and tweaked a few of our early additions to our survey.  It was then that Curtis pointed out our goal didn't really match our content anymore.  If we wouldn't have taken the time to formulate and write down a goal, I never would have realized it.  And I probably would have still thought of it as a survey on "tech tools" even though all the questions were now about "tech skills".  If I were to present it, I guarantee I would have coming out looking bad.  It was definitely a good reminder that survey creation has to be very purposeful and centered on a goal, otherwise you won't end up with the results you wanted.

On an unrelated side note that I may have brought up before, but will blather on about anyway, my Language Arts II class recently finished a completely paperless novel unit.  I'm currently working through grading their work, and I couldn't be happier.  Their blog posts were insightful, they worked great as teams, and most made a Prezi for their final project- unreal.  The vast majority of that class has much better Prezi chops than I have.  The only hangup was that I required them to use Today's Meet to meet at least once outside of class, with the stipulation that they had to get some actual work done (not just casually chat).  This was a headache. Maybe if someone else has had students work collaboratively online after school hours, he or she could impart some wisdom on me, because I won't be trying to force another class to go through that portion in the same way I planned it this year.  All things considered, though, the unit is a definite repeat for next year, and I'll probably convert a few other units to the blog/wiki format.