Zoomerang: 1st go at free service
Posted by: Paul Beaufait in free & open source, graphics, toolsOn Wed., Jan. 16, 2007, I had a first go at running a Zoomerang survey, using the service package available for free. Although the survey was easy to build and implement, severe limitations of free services made extracting the results a major pain.
As a peer had warned me almost a year ago [add ref. about here], when I first explored the possibilities, Zoomerang allows for free neither data exports, a very enticing Pro functionality, nor access to survey data after 10 days. Pro functionality isn’t cheap: 350 USD/year or 99 USD/3 months for educational uses (Zoomerang Support, 2008.01.18).
Fortunately, I had planned a simple survey – only three items: two unique item selection type items, and one free response item. The simplicity of the survey made responses relatively easy to represent from temporarily available Zoomerang data collections.
Soon after I had closed the survey, Zoomerang made collective and individual responses available on a website. I quickly endeavored to record response data manually in a location where I could retrieve and use it, ten or more days on, on my computer.
The gut nuts of this review are:
- For survey development and implementation, Zoomerang is easy to use;
- For free service-based data extraction, Zoomerang is a pain in the a….
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January 29th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Have you tried SurveyMonkey? It’s free for 100 respondents, storage unlimited in time. You can have as many surveys as you like, with a limit of 10 questions each (but each question can include many!). The only drawback in the free version is that you cannot export results to your disk, but you can get the screenshots and keep them as slides…
Hope that helps!
Gladys
PS: I was unable to find on your template some info about who’s keeping this blog… that’d be a nice addition!
PS2: how can I get two columns for the Sidebar in my Edublog? If you post your answer here, I’ll get the follow-up via email. Thanks in advance!
January 30th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Hey, Gladys! Thanks for the info. about SurveyMonkey, and the strengths and limitations of its free services. Your suggestion of taking screenshots to capture results is one I’ve used, though not with SurveyMonkey.
When I reviewed the Survey Monkey privacy policy for the second time a little over a year ago, I had misgivings about it being ambiguous, old, and uncertified:
Does SurveyMonkey protect respondents’ privacy?
(OnlineFacilitation [listserv], 2007.01.05).
Since January 2007, I haven’t returned to check again.
January 30th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
For a two-sidebar (three-column) template, I chose the Mandigo theme, in which the second sidebar is an option. The story begins in New Looks and continues in comments there (ltdproject, 2007.08.07 – 2008.01.28).
There’s another one out there almost equally interesting: Wordpress Theme – Amber. Amber promises liquid resizing of content to fit all sizes of browser windows (Blog Oh Blog, Jai, 2007.11.24).