Norwood School students demonstrate they’re tech-savvy

Posted 2/11/14

To celebrate National Digital Tech Day, which occurred on Feb. 5, the students and teachers at Norwood Elementary School created an online survey to learn some of the school’s favorite things. The …

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Norwood School students demonstrate they’re tech-savvy

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To celebrate National Digital Tech Day, which occurred on Feb. 5, the students and teachers at Norwood Elementary School created an online survey to learn some of the school’s favorite things. The results were revealed Friday during a Family Feud-style assembly.

Principal Nancy Plumb explained to her students during the afternoon assembly that the survey activity was designed by sixth grade teacher Deidre Pesola and librarian Tara Castro “to show we are computer savvy.”

Each class was asked to create a survey question and answer choices, which were submitted to Pesola and Castro. The two then created an online survey using the site Survey Monkey.

Because of the snowstorm that cancelled school on National Digital Tech Day, students took time during their class to answer the questions in the online survey using Norwood’s Google Chrome laptop cart in their classrooms on Tuesday and Thursday of last week. Pesola’s sixth grade class assisted kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders to complete the online survey. Every student in the school participated.

During Friday afternoon’s assembly, Plumb instructed each teacher to select five of their students to represent the class. Those five students were then called up when their class’s question was displayed on the projector. Castro took over the microphone to explain the rules of the Family Feud-style event; the five students were each given a white board and asked to write the answer they believed had the most correct answers.

Their classmates attempted to help them out, raising their hands to display the number of fingers corresponding with a possible answer.

The survey questions ranged from favorite animal to favorite Winter Olympic sport, with each having between three and six possible responses (except for the Kindergarten class’ question, which listed close to 20 possible responses for favorite creature). Some questions also had the option to write-in your own answer, and Castro shared those responses as well.

Some questions included what is your favorite kind of popcorn (popcorn with salt and butter), favorite author (Dr. Seuss), state you most want to visit (Hawaii), and favorite dessert (ice cream with no student answering, “I don’t like dessert”).

When the answer was finally revealed, cheers erupted from the audience who guessed the answer correctly.

Overall, Castro felt the process was a good learning experience for the students, both in the sense of technology and surveys.

“They had to all go online and take the survey, just using the chrome books and coming up with the questions [was a good experience],” she explained.

Pesola and Castro had planned to speak briefly to the students about the importance of taking data and collecting surveys but ran out of time. They hope the conversations about surveys carry over into the classroom because thinking about and collecting data on likes and dislikes can be a useful life skill in the future.

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