As a teacher, I take student feedback very seriously, but it has always been difficult to compile student comments from the old-school handouts which seem to be the standard. This year I decided to do something a little different, so I set up a Google Form and asked the students to complete it online. This was not too much of a problem logistically, as many of my classes are taught in the computer/language lab anyway. I simply embedded the Google Form in the university e-learning course for each class and pointed them at it. The results were near instantaneous, and Google did a rather nice job of compiling the data in visual form for me. (bottom left)
Whereas the visualization of the multiple-choice questions is done quite well in the Google Form summary page, I found the display of the data from the open-ended questions to be far less satisfactory.Certainly, I could go directly into the spreadsheet to view the data, but I wanted a better way to visualize it, so that I could post it somewhere in my office as a constant reminder. It was this desire that reminded me ofWordle.net, which is a great resource for visualization of textual data. I have used this before for visual representations of articles I have written, and as slides introducing presentations,and I have found the results quite pleasing. So, here is a Wordle map (below right) of the most common words used by my students in response to the following question: “What did you like about this class?”
Wouldn’t it be nice if Google added this format automagically?
, but I think something else is going on here. So I fired up MS Word and decided to test out the readability stats of both blogs using the tools there. Word will test your document for 
Stats for EdtechTESOL blog.
Stats for Student blog.
One of the great failures of blogging in the classroom is that the blogs rarely extend beyond the semester. Why is this?
