Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Share your voice via Net Day Speak Up

Cheryl Oakes shared a link to Net Day Speak Up on her great TechLearning post today, “Be Active Take Part in Something New.” According to the “Speak Up” website:

Speak Up, a national online research project facilitated by Project Tomorrow, gives individuals the opportunity to share their viewpoints about key educational issues. Each year, findings are summarized and shared with national and state policy makers. Participating schools and districts can access their data online, free-of-charge.

All districts and schools, in the current NCES database, are automatically registered to participate in Speak Up. To participate in the survey and obtain free, online access to your school or district’s aggregated results, your registration must be activated below.

Let your voice be heard! U.S. students, teachers and school leaders, and parents are all able to take the survey. I took it this evening as a parent and was impressed at many of the questions. For those involved in technology planning in schools, the choices on many of the questions would be potentially good agenda items to discuss at a technology planning meeting. For those living outside the United States, find out if a similar national survey is conducted in your country. If you have a link to a similar survey for other nations, please share it in a comment below. I think this type of annual survey is a GREAT idea and something that should be done in all schools.

The initial question about PERSONAL technology activities reflects many of the questions and responses in the “Creating and Connecting” report released in August by the National School Board Association:

NetDay Survey on activities

Think your school website is tops? It might be, but consider all the ideas for a dynamic and helpful site suggested by this question of the survey:

NetDay Top 5 Features for School Website

How about specific ways teachers and administrators at your school can be working to improve technology integration? The only thing I wanted to see on this list that wasn’t included was “provide every student in grade 3 and above with his/her own laptop computer for use at school and home.”

NetDay Survey: Top 3 Things to improve technology

I’ll be really interested to see the result of this question for our school. Do we think the school is doing a good job preparing students for their future? (We could also say “their present,” since the digital information landscape is HERE, it’s not a faraway and distant vision:

NetDay Survey: Is Your School Preparing for the Future?

Last of all, how about mobile devices at school? Should students be using iPods, cell phones, and laptops for learning? Again I’ll be interested to see these results locally:

NetDay Survey: Mobile Devices at school?

Many thanks to Cheryl for the heads up on Net Day Speak Up. Now it’s your turn! Go take the survey and encourage others attending, teaching, and connected to your school to do the same! We’re living in a cultural climate in the United States where “data driven decision making” receives a great deal of lip service. The free Net Day Speak Up survey provides a great opportunity for all educational stakeholders in your community to share their opinions, create local survey results to use for technology planning, and contribute to a larger research effort across the nation!

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