How important are these digital skills for you as an educator? (poll)

Published by in edtech on July 26th, 2010

I attended a meeting today which raised my blood pressure a bit. I’ll elaborate later, but for now I’ll invite you to take thirty seconds and answer the following five question poll. I’ve created this with Google Docs, and am embedding it below.

Thanks for your participation! After submitting your answers, you’ll be able to view the results to date. I’ll post and share the results here later in the week.

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On this day..

6 Comments »
  • Iain

    I feel your pain on this, my school is making me do an 4 hour long PDs on Audacity, Outlook, Photoshop and Habits of Mind, they only reason I didn’t sleep through the first one was the principal was sitting next to me.

    On an aside, the survey thing is awesome, do you have a link or could you do a little set of instructions on how to do build this as it would solve a problem I’ve been trying to solve with creating online tests for my students?

  • http://johnpeters1959.blogspot.com/ John Peters

    Iain;

    I know what you mean. This past school year I had to endure 5 DAYS of basic Mac training on the iLife suite. Something I’ve taught for several years myself! I don’t know why some administrators don’t get the fact that there are many more things than just the same type of PD for everyone, especially once we have focused on it for an entire year.

    While I do feel that it’s important to know how to do these things, there should be a variety of levels of PD not just a “cookie cutter” variety of PD where everyone has to complete the same thing, regardless of our skill level!

    Wes;

    I hate to admit it, but the tools that you cited in your survey I’m unfamiliar with. Maybe I should take a look to see what I’m missing.

    This sort of relates to the comment I made to Iain. There are so many different applications and software programs it’s difficult to be familiar with all of them. Many I’m very comfortable with, and others, like the ones in the survey, I’m not comfortable with. I’ve been thinking lately that we need to learn with what we have already.

    I think that many of us have access to some pretty nice technology “toys” at this point and the challenge now is for use to learn and incorporate what we already have. I know this is an area that I want to focus on in the upcoming school year. That, and to continue to learn from my PLN, and help my students, and colleagues, see the benefit of developing their own PLN is what I think will take on great importance for me this year.

  • http://www.carterfsmith.com Carter F. Smith

    I use Google Docs for surveys, but only periodically for students. Thankfully, the U’s I teach for all have a LMS that has decent gradebook calculations. I think I am the only one in the department that uses them in face-to-face classes, though . . .

  • Anne V

    Trackstar and Rubistar go waaay back. Possibly back to 1997? Or so? And who actually does mail-merges (especially teachers)? Or creates their own grade books anymore? Sounds like whatever it was you were sitting through has been recycled for the past decade.

    sigh

  • http://www.wesfryer.com Wesley Fryer

    @Anne V: Yes, that was part of the reason my blood pressure was elevated during the meeting. It felt like a flashback to 1999.

  • http://www.wesfryer.com Wesley Fryer

    Iain, I created a set of instructions for using Google Forms just for you! :-) Hope this helps.

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