Overview
Poll Everywhere (also known as Poll Anywhere) is an audience polling system that has both free and paid accounts.
LeBow has a college-wide license that gives access to more features than the free accounts. The free educational accounts are limited to 40 respondents per question and are not able to be integrated into Drexel’s Blackboard LMS for tracking student attendance. Faculty who are interested in being added to the college’s license should contact LeBow Instructional Tech at lebowintech@drexel.edu.
Poll Everywhere is a polling solution for live events like classes or orientations. With Poll Everywhere, faculty can create poll questions in advance and even embed them directly into their slide presentations. Audience members are then presented with the question and the ways they can respond: via SMS text message, via a laptop, or via a smart phone. Results are tracked instantly as they come in and can be displayed in real time. As a classroom tool, Poll Everywhere can be used to check student comprehension, survey participant opinion, or to collect open-ended responses.
How It Works
Log into your account at polleverywhere.com to create poll questions. Questions can be organized into folders so that, for example, all of your questions for a single lecture can be grouped together. There are three main types of poll questions: open questions where responses can be free text (used for things like fill-in-the-blank or short answer), multiple-choice questions where students pick from the available options, and even ranking questions where students put items in order. With open-ended polls, students can type anything like the numeric answer to a problem or a word or phrase. With multiple-choice questions, you provide the possible responses and each student submits the one that they select. You can even specify which is the right answer to a concept question so that students score a point for answering it correctly.
See Results with PowerPoint
Once you create your poll questions, Poll Everywhere will allow you to download a PowerPoint file containing a slide for each of your poll questions. You can then project those slides in a classroom and show students the class results after students have responded. Or you can simply have the Poll Everywhere website open to achieve this functionality without having to configure the software plug-in for PowerPoint.
Large Classes
LeBow’s Poll Everywhere college-wide license allows for large class sizes and also makes it easy to use poll responses to track student attendance in Blackboard. Contact the Instructional Technology Team or refer to the following article for more information on integrating Poll Everywhere into Drexel’s Blackboard LMS: Getting Started with Poll Everywhere Integration for Blackboard