The 2007 - 2008 school year is about to start for many teachers and students around the US. I know here in the state of Georgia most of the teachers have been extremely busy getting their classrooms prepared to welcome a new group of students to learning. This is the time of year filled with the excitement of hope, opportunity, anticipation, combined with just a tinge of uneasiness–wondering about the unknown.

Who exactly will be walking in the room on the first day of school?

Teachers almost always do two things during the first few days of school: lay down the law for their students, and, in an effort to begin getting to know them, find out what they did during the summer. This year, consider asking some questions you probably normally don't ask. In fact, I would like to ask you the very same questions and compare the two sets of answers.

I am very curious about how digitally involved our teachers and students are. All of the educators frequenting the technology conferences often talk about how digitally savvy our students are. They speak of how far behind our teachers are. But I'm just not so sure.

So I want to encourage you to take this survey. You should be done in less than 5 minutes. Then, I would love for you to have your students take the survey as well. The survey asks some very easy questions about what technology you did or didn't use this past summer.

If you're a teacher who would like to print the survey, pass it out to your students, and then input the results yourself (or have a reliable student do that for you), you can do that as well.

If you want to do the printed version: Below is the survey labeled for the boys: 2 pages, 35 easy questions. Click to download and print.

Below is the identical survey labeled for the girls: 2 pages, 35 easy questions. Click to download and print. (I will be comparing differences in the boys/girls answers.)

Below is the EZ Data Worksheet to make tallying the data as easy as possible for you. The worksheet helps you organize the survey results so inputing it into the online class survey is a snap. This worksheet also gives you some suggestions on ways to make giving the survey as quick and easy for you as possible. Click to download and print.

If you want to do the online version: This is the direct link to the individual survey for both teachers and students who can sit down to a computer and input their own individual answers.

To input the results from the printed version of the survey: This is the link to the class survey where one person puts in the results for an entire class or large group.

Over the next few weeks, I'll post the answers to the questions, updating them as needed. Hopefully the survey will be a door to more meaningful conversations with your students about technology use, ethical use, internet safety, etc.!

So go ahead... enjoy taking the survey!

Back on August 11th, I posted a survey for my readers in the hopes of gaining a little insight into how teachers and students used technology over the summer vacation. If you haven't taken the survey, it should take you no more than 5 minutes. The questions are simple, mostly "yes" or "no." Go for it! You can take the survey by clicking here.

I've had a number of adults take the survey. Thanks! Regrettably, I have had no student survey participants. I feared it might be a difficult thing to ask of teachers at the beginning of a school year. It's still not too late. Individual students can take the survey at this link. Or, you can input data aggregated from the whole class. The directions are posted here.

Well, here is a look at the first set of results from the teacher participants. And I think it's interesting what educators did during the summer with technology! Click on the picture to see the results. (And if I must say so myself, thanks to repurposing some code created by iWeb '08, the results are presented with more than a bit of flair!)