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Sharing happened rather serendipitously. As I was thinking about how to share, a teacher came to me with a question. In this case, the eighth grade team had just returned from the extended campus trip to Lake Sai. The trip leader traditionally does a survey after each extended campus trip. These are done on paper and it takes a tremendous amount of time to collate them and figure out what they mean. Typically, someone will tally up the responses with options, then the forms are just passed around team and teachers read what the students wrote—if they can read the hand writing.

Andrew asked if there were a way it could go on the web this time. He was very apologetic and didn't want to take up my time, but I saw a golden opportunity to start selling people on how to do the web surveys. Working with him, we took his survey and converted it to a form on the web. Since he doesn't have Access^®, we decided to use a comma-delimited text file.

Even though the form wasn't put up until after half the eighth grade had done a paper form, the other half filled in the form and the information was immediately available. This demonstrated the power of using the web in a very visible way to both teachers and building administration.

In this case, I did more of the work than teaching how to set the program up to do it. However, since time was short, I decided it was better to demo the program and the capabilities to sell people on these features, then help them do it later. This approach was successful because people saw the benefits. The next step is to work with them so they can learn the features.

The survey is available at http://staff.asij.ac.jp/dfincher/sai

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Created Fall, 2001

Last maintained 11/15/2003