Week Four

This week's assignments revolved around the investigation of Hitwise and Bill Tancer. I groaned at first thinking, "Yuck! A company and a guy...how boring." I was wrong. Bill Tancer's Authors@Google video was surprisingly engaging. Tancer's an interesting speaker although peculiar in his fascination with data! His passion for what he does is enviable.

Hitwise amazed me! What the company offers to clients is surreal. It's products and services supply all the help a company could ever need to expand its business and become more profitable. I especially enjoyed perusing the Data Center where I could view current Internet statistics.

This week we also wrapped up our Survey assignment from Week 3. The survey process is interesting but not something I enjoy. The process has helped me feel more confident as I think about analyzing data gathered from our benchmark tests at school. This process has also reinforced to me the value of surveys in the classroom. I have yet to survey or poll my students electronically, but am hoping as I learn to use Clickers this year I will be charting and analyzing data to benefit the classroom. (I also like this article about Clickers.)

Week 3

This week our group worked collaboratively in TypeWith.Me to plan and create a survey. The tool worked beautifully for our purposes. We started by brainstorming ideas and then worked to clarify our purpose and the intent of our survey. I found the process challenging as I like to ask questions of interest to me! There's no room for that in surveying as all questions should have value to the purpose of the survey. We paid careful attention to our questions and whether they were relevant to our purpose as well as clearly worded and easily understood. This was a tedious task. We decided after some discussion and looking at Survey Monkey to use Zommerang. (A group member has an account.) Zoomerang allowed us to use the number of questions we needed and vary the type of questions and responses to match our needs as well as compile the data in a variety of charts and graphs. We pretested the survey and will meet soon to finalize it prior to asking others to participate.

I attempted to wade through Part 3 of the PowerPoints in order to complete the accompanying worksheet...I say ATTEMPTED. I might as well have been reading something written for a rocket scientist. I'm hoping in this week's class z-scores will be explained, and we'll have an opportunity to go through the worksheets from the previous week.