Using Wordle for Survey Themes

One school I work with undertook a community survey in order to prepare for their strategic visioning. They used SurveyMonkey for their online survey and produced a wealth of information, much of it qualitative. One of the ways to identify trends from this survey was to put results into wordle. One of the questions that was asked was: When you think of our school what is the first word that comes to mind? Here is the wordle showing what common words appeared:

All the students in the school were asked questions too. Here is an example of what the Year 6 students said in response to the question: What was special about your school?

On the same question of "What makes your school special?" here is what the Year One students (five year olds) thought was special:













Fascinating isn't it?
I think wordle has lots of potential for quickly identifying themes, so thanks to Matt Tippen for sewing the idea in my head. I can see it's use for personal evaluations and for quick client feedback. What do you think?

Leadership for the Future

This week is the ULearn conference in Christchurch, New Zealand. I will be presenting a spotlight called "You're a leader -lead!" We need strong leaders in education - ones who have to courage to move forward while still having the wisdom to take others with them, and indeed develop collective intelligence. Leaders need to understand themselves as learners and to think about the impact they have on other people. They also need to relate to others - leadership is not an individual pursuit! Below this post you have the opportunity to undertake a short survey on Relating to Others. The survey has been developed in Google Docs and is based on the 'Relating to Others' key competency from the NZ Curriculum. If we are serious about the need for students to develop in each of the five key competencies (Managing Self; Relating to Others; Participating and Contributing; Thinking; and Using Language, Symbols & Texts) don't we have to lead by example? More than ever, ethical and moral leadership are critical to growing humanity. Yet we seem to be struggling to develop alignment between our espoused values and what we actually do in practice. Take time to reflect on yourself as a leader and who you are as a person.