We started using online surveys using surveyatschool as a teaching tool to generate real data for our students to analyse (see online surveys post).  We then realised that we could use the same tool for us to find out more about the ICT needs of our students and teachers.

Student Voice Surveys
We have created two surveys that all our KS3/4 students complete each year.  The How am I teaching Survey gives our students the chance to suggest ways that we can improve the curriculum and how we teach it.  Looking at the trend from the last 3 years, it seems that the students are becoming more positive about ICT as a subject.  A strong opinion has been that what we teach them needs to be relevent to their lives today, not how they may use ICT in the future.  We have tried to address this by enabling students to create websites about what interest them and creating a survey about teenager lifestyles in the UK and USA.
We also run a survey to find out more about how our students use their computers at home.  It is startling to see how quickly and how many of our students have gained access to broadband.  It is also heartening to see them use their home computers increasingly for school work.  This will have a major impact on the sorts of new activities that we can expect students to do as homework, such as wider research on a specific issue.

Teacher ICT Audit Survey
I was asked to create a survey to audit trainee teachers to help them identify their ICT training needs.  I also created a paper based version.  It is interesting to note that most of the skills are what we expect our students to be able to do by the end of KS3.  It is scary to realise that most teachers have less ICT capability than the average Y9 student!

Action Research Survey
With Kirsty Brown, our ICT GTP, I conducted some research into effective uses of personalised learning.  We’ve adapted a unit to create a leaflet to include opportunties for learning to learn, collaboration and communicating with a real audience.  At the end of the unit the students completed a survey to feed back whether the changes made to the unit motivated them to produce a better quality of work.  We downloaded the answers and analysed the data in Excel.