Poll Everywhere for Teaching and Learning
Introduction
Poll Everywhere is a web-based student response system (or polling tool) that allows teaching staff to create a range of activities to engage students and increase participation in either face-to-face or online classes.
This polling tool takes advantage of the mobile devices that students already use, it can afford students anonymity and encourages interaction between peers. Students respond by following links to activities in a web browser or app on their computers or mobile devices. The results are collated and updated instantly and can be shared with students at the discretion of the lecturer/tutor thus encouraging participation and generating opportunities for reflection and discussion.
This page outlines why one may consider using Poll Everywhere, describes potential teaching and learning use cases and outlines the key features of the tool.
Poll Everywhere is now available to all UCD staff and can be accessed via https://www.polleverywhere.com/auth/saml/ucd
For technical support and resources refer to the Educational Technology Team, UCD IT Services.
Why Use Poll Everywhere?
More specifically consider using Poll Everywhere to:
- bring a lecture alive, by utilising it to promote participation and interactivity
- foster student engagement in a gamified way
- facilitate a wide variety of question/ activity types
- share outputs by sharing live on screen, embedding in VLE, sharing on social media or via email
- use in virtual classroom or face-to-face synchronous sessions or asynchronously by sharing via VLE
- to support UCD approaches to giving student feedback that are highlighted in the module descriptor. In particular supporting self-assessment and automated feedback.
Poll Everywhere can transform a one-way lecture or presentation into a two-way interactive conversation with the students or audience. You can use it to present polls, review questions, quizzes or run competitions. You can integrate these types of activities in your teaching as an effective strategy to increase interactivity and engagement in either face-to-face or online classes, particularly with large cohorts.
The students respond on any mobile device (phone, tablet, laptop) through a web browser (mobile-friendly web page) or using the Poll Everywhere app (Apple iTunes or Google Play).
Teaching and Learning Use Cases
Most commonly from a teaching and learning perspective student response systems or polling tools like Poll Everywhere are used by teaching staff to engage students within the classroom (physical and online) and gather their insights in real time. Students can respond to the lecturer's questions/polls in real time, then the lecturer can display poll responses live on screen, this can be used for the following types of teaching and learning activities:
- icebreaker activities (word cloud, clickable image, upvote responses)
- formative assessment to allow students to check understanding and get feedback
- gauging students’ understanding of concepts during class
- stimulating debate/discussion in class by asking (including anonymously) opinion questions (surveys)
- getting feedback on a session from students informing contingent teaching
- checking progress of a project or assignment
- introducing a gamified approach or team based learning (competitions)
Key Features of Poll Everywhere
- Range of Activities/question types: Multiple Choice, Multiple Answer, Survey, Word Cloud, Hotspot (Clickable image), Open-ended responses, Upvoting
- Team based leaderboards and games via competition activity
- Choice between anonymous (using a public poll) or identified student responses (sign in via UCD PollEverywhere)
- Option to moderate and approve responses
- Option to save and reuse polls from trimester to trimester, cohort to cohort
- Use in virtual classroom (synchronous) sessions by providing students with a weblink (display instructions on screen) to respond to then present and share the results of the poll via screen sharing functionality of virtual classroom tool
- Use asynchronously i.e. survey question types can be answered in students own time. For more information see: How to create shiny new Poll Everywhere surveys
- Fast, seamless operation: watch results update live, when one poll ends, the next is shown automatically.
- Integrates with Powerpoint, Keynote, Google Slides and other presentations software
- A large batch of questions can be imported (using a CSV file) to create activities. More information here: https://www.polleverywhere.com/support/articles/create-activities/import-questions