CEdO540 Week 5

Really liked working with Google Trends. Our group trended everything from peanut butter to vacations, to ice cream flavors! It's alot of fun and extremely interesting to see the internet activity. I will be showing this to my Business Ed teacher as I'm sure he will like it for his marketing classes.

Researching the different data table websites was also interesting. I've actually used many of them in other research I've done, so I was pretty familiar with them. The comparison was nice because now I know which ones I will use more regularly with my students.

CEdO540 Week 4

Creating a survey was kind of fun. Outside of surveying my students and teachers on technology use for our technology plan, I've never just surveyed the general public. Our group is still analyzing the data, but I am very pleased with the adversity of the population who took it. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, it was extremely easy to get the survey out to the public. I passed it along to my sister, who passed it along to her co-workers, who passed it along to their friends. It would have been much harder to get these same results if we handed out a paper survey. Plus, I think its easier to keep an online survey anonymous. Howerver, after reading up on Bill Tancer and how he conducts his research based on searches through IP addresses, I have to wonder if the survey results are truly anonymous? Could there be a way to identify by email address who took the survey and identify their individual results?

CEdO540 Week 3

As usual, the statistics homework completely confused me. I don't think I've ever felt so stupid as an educator...it's only numbers...why can't I wrap my mind around the equations? My groupmate, Andrew, really tried to to explain it to me. He's such a trooper! But, what can I say, I still don't get it.

However, we've made great progress with our survey! Our survey focuses on opinions of Walker's budget repair bill. We'll be giving it to a large population other than teachers, so it will be interesting when we analyze the results. We used Surveymonkey to create it and it was very easy! I've passed the link along to several people I work with, as well as my sisters and people they work with. Isn't technology great...if we had done a paper survey, we never would be able to reach a variety of the population so quickly.