If you’ve enjoyed using Zoom surveys in your online classes, consider PollEverywhere for your live or hybrid classes.  I’ve been using it for several years and I’m a big fan.  PollEverywhere allows you to run polls in ways that are similar to Zoom polls but better.  Here are some additional benefits:

Identify which students gave which responses.

• It’s one thing to know that 60% of the class chose Option A and 40% of the class chose B. Even better is knowing who chose A and who chose B.
• With just two clicks, I can see a spreadsheet of responses (and one more click to sort by answer). This allows me to strategically ask individual students to explain why they chose an option. For example, maybe I want to hear a student defend Option A before asking for a defense for Option B. Using this approach also makes it easier for me to elicit contributions from students who aren’t normally the first to raise their hands.

Show the students the poll results immediately

• OK, this is just like Zoom (not an additional benefit).  But it’s one of the great things about PollEverywhere.

Keep track of attendance

• I start all of my classes with a PollEverywhere survey that relates directly to a question I posed on Canvas for that day.  When students enter the classroom, they see an on-screen reminder to answer the poll.
• This not only gets them thinking about the material right away (and gives me a sense of where they stand on the material) but also automatically counts up who was present in class that day.  At the end of the quarter, I just download the full spreadsheet of responses for the quarter, sum the rows, and voila! attendance has been taken.

Choose from several different types of polls

• In addition to multiple choice, the PollEverywhere options include:
• – asking students to plug in a word and PollEverywhere will create a word cloud of the responses
  – asking students to provide some information and the rest of the class can upvote or downvote the contribution
  – showing an image and asking students to click anywhere on the image to respond
  – asking an open-ended question
• To be honest, I use multiple choice 80% of the time. But it’s nice to have the alternative formats for particular use cases.  For example, I sometimes start the quarter by asking students to type in the first word they think of when they think of marketing. The resulting word cloud is always a great way to launch the class!

Integrate easily with your presentation software

• PollEverywhere has a plug-in for Powerpoint, Keynote and Google Slides. The plug-in allows you to present the poll results within your presentation (and without having to exit the presentation). This works great in Powerpoint–I haven’t tried the other plug-ins. (Keep in mind though, if you want to see which students gave which responses, you have to exit your presentation to do this.)

Students don’t have to log into a system to participate

• If you don’t need to associate responses to specific students (for example, when teaching executive education), you can simply provide students with a simple link, which they can type into their mobile handsets.  (For me, the link is pollev.com/KentGrayson920.)  Or, participants can text their answers (A, B, C, D) to a number provided on-screen.

The customer service is great

• The PollEverwhere interface is pretty intuitive so I haven’t had to ask for help very much over the years. But when I’ve had a question, I have always received a super helpful response within 24 hours at the latest and often within a few hours.
• Also note: there are helpful how-to videos available online, some of which have been produced by the company, and others produced by teachers who have used the platform.

Students can interface with the platform in multiple ways.  Here’s how I do it

• On the first day of class, they have to register on the system. To make it easy for them to register, I have already uploaded their names, email addresses, and section numbers. (I get that information in spreadsheet from from the Kellogg website.)  Once they’ve registered I ask them to create a bookmark for pollev.com/KentGrayson920. From then on, they just navigate to that bookmark.
• Alternatively, there’s a PollEverywhere app.  Some of my students have discovered this and they have said it makes it even easier to interact with the platform.

The one downside is that the free version of Polleverywhere does not allow all the benefits I listed, and it works for only 40 students at a time. Depending on how much of the year you want to use it, the fee ranges from $350 – $700.  Or, you can charge your students $14 each (seventy cents per session–a bargain! 🙂)  I’ve sometimes been able to offset the costs over the years via grants.