Giving students a voice

In my last post, I discussed giving students more credit for their ideas and pre-existing knowledge when it comes to technology.  Now, my next task is to give students more of a voice when it comes to their technology use and possibly how they'd like to use technology in the classroom.  As many of us have already discovered, students are much more technology-savvy than we can even comprehend, and they may have great ideas of how to use technology that we haven't yet thought about.

Last week, I was considering having my student fill out a brief survey about their personal technology use. I hadn't decided on the range of questions and answers I hoped to gain from the survey, but, thinking I might have time to put something together by the afternoon, I wrote "technology survey" on the bottom of the agenda.

As it turned out, I did not have time to formulate survey questions, so that item on the agenda was erased.  However, at least ten students who had read the agenda were inquisitive about what the "technology survey" was all about, and even if we didn't have time that day to do it, could they complete it another day.  Their interest, based solely on the fact that the survey had something to do with technology amazed me.  And it wasn't just a handful of kids from the same table group asking, it was multiple students throughout the day expressing their excitement.

Eventually, I am hoping to survey my students on various aspects of technology, mainly to find out what they currently use at home, and what they would like to see used in the classroom.  However, I am waiting until I can come up with questions that will be purposeful and school-related.  For example, one idea for a question that I initially had was to ask students the top 5 websites they visit on a regular basis.  However, after further consideration, there are some questions that I may not want to know the answers to (i.e. It doesn't really impact me or the classroom if a student shares that he or she has a facebook page and spends 2-3 hours on it per week, but if said student's parents don't know about the facebook page, it would be uncomfortable information for me to know).

So-I am welcome to ideas and suggestions of ways to get students involved in the conversation.  I am more and more interested in what they already know, what they are interested in, and what they would like assistance learning more about.  If you have any ideas of helpful questions I could ask or other ways to begin the discussion, please let me know. My current focus revolves around internet use, but I'd be open to expanding the part of the survey/discussion to other aspects of technology.
[Ideally, it would be nice to just have an open conversation/discussion, but it would also be helpful to have written answers and some concrete data to work from.]