Gathering Data on Your School Website.

It's a little difficult to gather data when an entire school has the freedom to do research on anything they want, when individual goals are used to motivate teachers to grow and expand in their field of expertise.  It's even harder to gather baseline data when one of your goals is to build communication with your parents by using the new website development program your district has put out and the address of your website has now changed.

I'm not complaining (well maybe a little) but the challenge is there, where do you start?  For our Innovative Grant we've have a number of subjects that we're working on, a range of reasearch from going paperless to using both online free websites, wikis and twitter to communicate more fully with both students and parents, from assessment to project based planning.  We'll be doing base data in each and every form for all these areas, but not the general baseline data that the district wants because it's not applicable to our area of study that we need.

So how do you get a baseline of data for communicating with your parents when your parents are not in the school constantly and you have over 1000 students in the school (that's a lot of parents)?  You do it during Parent teacher interviews and use an IPad and a Google Form to get it done.

Our baseline started simple, asking parents is they use these sites, and asking them to register for our blog that we hooked up to the SurreySchools website.  The blog was implemented last year to replace our school newspaper as well as having the ability to update any important data to our parents inside the district our outside.  All administration have access to this blog and one of our office staff updates it in a moment notice.  The blog ranges from important information to accolades of our students and staff.  When parents sign up for the blog they get an email anytime something comes up, so they don't have to go to the site, they can read what's going on with their phone or at their work office.  No surprise, most schools are doing this.  But the goal is to now get parents to be aware of this change and to get them to sign up.

Our Base Data Survey (please do not submit the survey as you will corrupt the data) is below.  We used Google Forms for it which gives you an excel sheet as well as graphs your results for you.

 

The results of this survey will be in the next blog.