Making a Plan

Chapter 1 of Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse or A Year in the Classroom really hit home with me. I've had a lot of teaching experiences, both in the classroom and in more informal teaching situations such as tutoring, where I have a very abstract idealistic view of the kind of teacher that I want to be and then when I actually start teaching I find myself struggling just to keep up and survive because I don't have a clear plan. I think it is definitely important to have a vision that goes beyond the lesson plan, and writing down clear and concrete goals to help you get there makes it much more likely that that vision will be fulfilled. I liked the example goals in the chapter about learning students' names and learning styles -- I really appreciate when teachers take the time to do this, but I have discovered that it definitely does not happen automatically. I was also interested in the discussion about the environment of the classroom, something which I feel is often overlooked but which can be very important. I will definitely keep these considerations in mind whenever I find myself in the role of teacher in the future.

Sploder

Sploder is a great tool for making your own video games easily. There are several creators available for making different types of games, including platformers, retro arcade games, physics puzzles and more. Here's a game made with their physics puzzle creator:

Make a Free Flash Game

Spicynodes

Spicynodes is an awesome free tool. It is very easy to use and quite fun to play around with. Plus, it has a great library of designs. Here is what a Spicynode looks like:



Make sure to click on each of the bubbles in the Spicynode to see all of the content.

If you have ever used Prezi before, you might see some similarities between Spicynodes and Prezi. The main difference is that Prezi is usually used for presentations with a set path, while a Spicynode can be explored in any order. Also, Spicynodes are put together like a tree diagram, with parts that branch off of each other, which is a bit different from Prezi as well.

Survey Tools Conclusion

Several of the remaining survey tools that I was going to look at have closed down and I think I have already touched on the most useful ones. So for these reasons, I am going to conclude my survey tool search. Here are the three survey tools I looked at: 

• Surveymonkey.com
• Fluidsurveys.com
• Polldaddy.com 

All three of these tools definitely have their strong points and weak points. PollDaddy offers the widest range of features, while Fluid Surveys offers a wide range of great looking designs. I find that the one I use the most is SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey is simple to use and produces very nice-looking surveys. I would also like to mention that Google Docs also has a great survey tool. 

I encourage you to take a look at one or more of the survey tools that I have mentioned. I hope you find them fun and useful! 

Survey Tool #3

The third Survey tool I tried was polldaddy.com. Polldaddy can create both polls and surveys as well as quizzes and ratings. This is the only site that I tried that could create quizzes and ratings. The surveys are easy to make and end up looking possessional. They have some great themes that make your survey look good, or you can make your own. Click on the link below to see a sample survey.




And here is a poll:




Here's a rating:

And, last but not least, a quiz:





So that's Polldaddy, survey tool number three. I'll have to tell you about number four very soon!

The Quest for the Perfect Survey Tool

Lately I have been trying out some free online survey tools. I'm going to try six in all and then rank them.

So here are numbers one and two: 

The first survey tool is SurveyMonkey.com. I think I have blogged about this before. It's extremely easy to use and it makes very professional looking surveys. It does have a limit of ten questions per survey that can get kind of annoying at times, but overall I think this is an awesome survey tool. Here's an example survey:    

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

The second one is FluidSurveys.com.  Fluid Surveys can make both surveys and polls. It is also easy to use, although not as simple as SurveyMonkey. The surveys turn out professionally and good looking. Here's a survey (I know it's really small-- here's the link to see it full screen: http://fluidsurveys.com/surveys/squirt/fun-survey/ ) :



And here is a poll:






I'll post about more survey tools soon! At some point I am also planning to add pictures to the "Websites" page.

Prezi

Prezi.com is a new kind of presentation tool! Instead of spread out on many pages, a Prezi presentation only has one page. You can zoom in and out of the presentation, revealing new details and text. It can be a little tricky to use at first, but Prezi has several helpful tutorials avaliable on their website.