Find out how to use online polls as part of your teaching to gather ideas, test knowledge and canvas opinions.
Poll Everywhere
At Sussex, we use web-based tool Poll Everywhere. Users can respond with the tool’s mobile app, website, Twitter account or by text message.
Benefits for teaching
Poll Everywhere has a range of different question types that teaching staff can integrate into teaching sessions, including:
- mutliple choice
- open ended
- word clouds
- clickable images.
You can use LaTeX when authoring questions.
You can also create team based quizzes to gamify your teaching and display live results to discuss during teaching sessions.
A Poll Everywhere presenter add-in is also available for PowerPoint which allows you to embed your polls in your PowerPoint presentations. This add-in is available on all University teaching computers and can be downloaded on to University-owned staff computers from the Software Centre. Poll Everywhere also integrates with Google Slides and Keynote.
Benefits for learning
Using polls in your teaching provides:
- students with anonymity when answering questions, reducing self-consciousness and encouraging engagement
- encourages communication between students, prompts discussion and peer instruction
- creates a dialogue between students and teaching staff allowing you to quickly gather feedback
- allows you to identify gaps in students ’ knowledge and quickly address these.
Limitations
There are some drawbacks to using polling as part of your teaching, including:
- students need a mobile device or computer to respond, though the practice of students sharing devices and discussing answers has been shown to have significant learning benefits
- the time needed to create questions
- students on pay-as-you-go contracts will be charged the standard network rate when responding via text.
Creating an account
Due to the increasing popularity of Poll Everywhere we have reserved accounts for teaching purposes only, so we keep within the limits of our licence.
To be added as a user to the University’s licence, email tel@sussex.ac.uk.
More help
For further guidance on using Poll Everywhere, please email tel@sussex.ac.uk.or contact your School Learning Technologist