Three Minute Tech Byte: Poll Everywhere
Poll Everywhere is a great way to use formative assessment in the classroom. Or get feedback at an organizational meeting. Or just have fun at the next large get-together. As always, your feedback is important, leave your thoughts in the form below:
Transcript
Hi, this is Scott, your friendly Director of Instructional Technology here at USAO. And in today’s Three-Minute Tech Byte, I want to show a really interesting and quite powerful formative assessment tool, that you can start using in your classrooms tomorrow. Or if you are a student leader in an organization and you want to get some feedback on in your next meeting, you can use this as well.
The cool place we are going today is called Poll Everywhere. PollEverywhere.com, it’s an amazing website and it is easy to use and get into. In fact, you don’t even have to sign up to create your first poll. So what I have done is gone to polleverywhere.com, and I am going to click to create my first poll. I have a limit of 25 responses on this. Anything I do will be lost after a couple of weeks of inactivity. So, it is really simple. I can make a question right here. “Do you…” oops these are all caps, “do you attend USAO?” So here could be my first question. I can create it, and maybe…here we go, I can have a “yes” and a “no.” So this is a multiple choice. I create this particular question, the question is ready to go, and then I can present it. So, once you put in your questions, you can present it. You get an activate. Here is your activation button right here. It publishes your poll. It gives your poll a website address so that you can share it with your students. Or students, you can share it with your colleagues or whatever meeting that you are working. You can also choose how you want people to respond to the poll. They can send text messages to this specific number – 22333, they can join this poll.
And when you show this poll like I am showing it to you right now, you can text in, text “adoredbanana106 to 22333” to join in. And then you will get immediate feedback as your students or participants start answering questions that you see. Now, I chose a multiple choice question for this. But there are a variety of questions that you can use from word clouds to images, to surveys and you can use all of those things and get immediate feedback from your students. You could even use this in, say, for example, a math class. You could type in a question they are working on with some answers or you could have the students send back their answers. And it really is a hand way to get instant data back. And all you need is some sort of phone that can send or receive text messages.
So if you have got a classroom where students are texting, then they can text you an answer. Now, how cool would that be? To have your students texting an answer to a problem. If you have your computer, you can plug your computer in and go to the website to participate just as easily. You don’t have to use only a phone. It is really, really handy. The other cool thing is, here at USAO, there is a free plan, that’s offered through higher ed and you can get up to 40 responses per poll. That means per question you can get 40 answers. And you can also embed it into your powerpoint or create word clouds or text walls. So there’s some really handy ideas you can use with poll everywhere. I hope this is something that you can start using right away.
Thanks for watching.