Students Speak Out in Survey
Arrowhead Senior, Tommy Durand, takes the Speak Up survey in Arrowhead’s North Campus Cafeteria.
Students at Arrowhead High School were asked to participate in a survey titled “Speak up” on Wednesday, November 30th. The survey was aimed to discover the effectiveness of technology in education and the opinions of students on integrating technology into their classroom according to Project Tomorrow, the sponsor of the survey.
Since 2003, educators from over 30,000 schools have used the Speak Up data to create and implement their vision for 21st century learning, according to www.tomorrow.org.
Some of the main points of the survey included the following: Are students more engaged in learning when instruction includes these tools? Can technology increase teacher productivity or student achievement? Do these tools support the development of critical thinking, communications, teamwork and global awareness? What are the expectations of parents, business leaders and community members around the use of technology within learning? If schools want to make better use of these digital tools, what are the challenges they face—is it funding, teacher training, support, bandwidth? How do students say they want to use these digital tools to support learning?
Across America, administration, school board members, civic leaders and even policymakers asked these questions and will rely on the outcome of this survey to give them more direction for their policies, plans and program according to Project Tomorrow, the sponsor of the survey.
However, the answers they receive may not be reliable. Arrowhead senior, Thomas Durand, said, “I just wanted to get through it as fast as I could. I didn’t even read the questions, I just marked random answers. I don’t even know what it’s for. We get too many surveys, after a while you just get sick of them.”
This was echoed by another Arrowhead senior, Stephen Gardner, who said, “There was way too many questions and way too many options. I don’t feel like taking that much time and effort to fill out some survey that probably won’t affect me. I already do enough reading for my regular classes.”
Another Arrowhead senior, Ethan Fenske, said this, “Surveys are so stupid. We take so many and there’s no way people answer the questions honestly. There’s no point in giving them to us because no one wants to take them. It won’t even help them because a lot of people don’t answer honestly. The only good part is that you get out of class, but who wants to spend time off class taking a long survey that doesn’t even matter.”
Some students don’t share this philosophy, however. Arrowhead senior, Jack Schlinsog said, “I did the whole survey. I answered honestly too. I don’t mind doing them, it’s just busy work really. Not much different than any other assignment in class. And I wasn’t worried about my answers because it’s all anonymous anyways. I didn’t have anything better to do. It made the classes shorter too which is always a plus.”
This survey is used by many different administrations to improve their use of technology in education according to Project Tomorrow.
The survey closes in January 13, 2017, and the results will be available in February. Data from the Speak Up survey will be posted on the Project Tomorrow’s website: www.tomorrow.org.
