Digital Survey Tools

Video Transcription

Hello there, and welcome.

In this lesson, you will be exposed to how and when you might use some incredible online tools currently available that can make creating surveys quick, easy, and actually kind of fun. Let's check them out.

Today, it is most common for surveys to be conducted digitally, or electronically, making paper and pencil surveys obsolete and a thing of the past. The convenience that conducting surveys digitally offers is unparalleled, because they convert by fast, user-friendly, and reliable survey data for all levels of users. The benefits don't end there though.

In addition to being easier and faster, they are also less expensive to use than paper-pencil surveys. They allow respondents to answer questions quickly, honestly, and with privacy. There isn't the pressure that comes with a face-to-face interview. You can find free digital surveys online that even offer customer support for the user. And digital surveys make it easy to compile and analyze the results and prepare them for reporting.

Like most things relating to technology, the options for how to conduct surveys and analyze data available to us online is constantly changing and increasing. There are some digital survey tools that by today's standards have stood the test of time. We will review four such tools in this lesson. They are: SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Poll Everywhere, and Socrative.

The first digital tool we'll look at is called SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey was founded way back in 1999, and has evolved into a very popular free online digital survey tool that helps professionals not only create surveys, but collect information and analyze the data as well. Let's take a look at what SurveyMonkey looks like, and some of the features that are available. Keep in mind that as I walked through these, I'm only going to point out some of the key features. I highly encourage you to get online, set up an account, and play with them on your own.

So let's begin. On most of these sites, once you log in, you'll see an option for Create a Survey. SurveyMonkey gives you the option to build a new survey from scratch. I've called this one Science Materials. And it asks you to choose a category. Here, I've chosen Education, obviously. Once you get to the Builder option, you get to choose what type of question. For this one, I've decided to go with multiple choice.

The question I'm asking is, did you have enough science materials to complete the experiment. And then I've written my options here, yes and no. As you can see, you can add other answer options as well. When you finish with the question, you hit Save.

Once you've included all the questions in your survey, you're given a web link that you can send to the participants of the survey to answer. As you can see, there are other options here you as the creator can choose for your respondents.

Next, we'll look at Google Forms. Google Forms continues to gain popularity in schools in businesses because it allows you to collect and organize information for free. Introduced in the late 2000s, it's a digital survey tool that allows users to create, collaborate on, and share polls, quizzes, surveys, and much more. Let's go ahead and demonstrate how to use a Google form to create a digital survey.

In your Google Drive, choose the option for Google Forms. It'll open directly into a template for you to fill out. I've called this one Math PD. And my first question is, how effective was this morning's session. I've decided to make this a multiple choice question. And the options are, not effective at all, somewhat effective, very effective, and extremely effective. There is of course an option to add Other as well.

If this is the only question that will be included in your survey, you click Done. If there's more, you select Add Item. When creating the questions, you have many options to select from to make it a certain type of question. For example, text, paragraph, multiple choice, and so on.

Like SurveyMonkey, when you're finished, you'll get a link to an address that you will send to the people taking the survey. If those people have Gmail, are on the same network as you, you can create and populate that list directly from your contacts.

Poll Everywhere is a live, interactive way to gather information using mobile devices, Twitter, or web browsers. Another feature of Poll Everywhere is that it delivers the results in real time. This tool is also referred to as a student response system, but is also commonly used in many situations such as conferences, meetings, and assemblies.

Let me show you how easy it is to create a survey using Poll Everywhere. Again, once you've logged in you select Create Poll. This site, like many of the others, offers a tutorial on how to do this. Once you select Create, you begin.

You type in your first question. In this case, I've written, how often do you assign writing homework. For this one, I've selected multiple choice, but you do have other options. You can add another poll question, or you can just finish up and create, which is what I'll do here.

This is what the question would look like when it's projected. Participants can use a web browser and use this address, or more commonly they use smartphones and text a code to this address, and select the number of the answer that they choose.

The last tool we'll discuss is Socrative. Socrative is made available by MasteryConnect, and is another digital tool that allows for real time questioning and aggregation of results. Like the others, it's fairly straightforward and very intuitive to use. Let's take a look.

Once you've logged in, you can choose from these options. You can create a quiz, just do a quick question, Space Race is a game mode, and Exit Ticket. For the purposes of this lesson, we'll just go with Quick Question.

You have the option of creating multiple choice, true or false, or short answer. For this example, I've used short answer. You can see it coded as SA at the top. And the question is, what did your team work on at the last collaborative meeting. I've also selected that each person can only respond once, and that their name is required.

Once you hit Start, respondents will go to the web page and click in the code number. And the presenter, or the creator of the question, will receive the responses. And they'll look like this.

So it's time to go ahead and summarize this lesson. We started by talking about the fact that electronic surveys have far surpassed the use of paper-pencil surveys, and listed many reasons why. Next, we looked at and demonstrated the use of four online survey tools. They are SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Poll Everywhere, and Socrative.

Today's food for thought is something I mentioned already. Set up some free accounts and play with these tools online. You can also find more information on how to apply what you learned in this video by looking at the additional resources section. The additional resources section includes links useful for the application of this course material, including a brief description of each resource.

As always, thanks so much for joining me. We'll see you next time.