Tuesday, November 8, 2011

No Clickers, No Problem! Try Poll Everywhere

Want to create class surveys and get instant student feedback about math problems, but you don't have access to clickers?  No clickers, no problem!  Poll Everywhere allows you to create multiple choice and free response questions for your students.  You'll get instant results that can be shared with the class. 

Poll Everywhere is committed to education and has many features that make it ideal for classroom use.  Below is a list of some of these features:
  • Create as many surveys as you want with a Free teacher account...With a free K-12 account, you can have up to 40 students respond to each poll.  Just create a new poll or If you have a single class with more than 40 students, you can email them and they will adjust your plan.
  • Polls are quick and easy to create...You literally could have a poll created and ready to use in a couple of minutes.
  • Multiple ways for students to vote...Students can text their responses in or they can vote online if they have access to an iPad or computer.  
  • As responses come in, they automatically appear on the results chart...You don't have to refresh in order to see newest results.
  • Results charts can be embedded into blogs, websites, Power Points, etc...This is a nice feature which would allow for comments about the poll or survey.  You could also use this as means to address student misconceptions if they were responding to a math problem.
  • No spam or advertisements!
The features listed above are all available with the Free teacher account.  If you'd like to be able to get reports, moderate responses, and create response segmentation for contests or comparisons, you can get an individual teacher plan for $50 per year.  School and district plans also make these extra features available.

In a future post, I'll give some specific suggestions/ideas for using Poll Everywhere in the math classroom.

I've added Poll Everywhere to The Best Technology Tools for Teaching Math list.

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