Poll Everywhere: A Lecturer’s Panacea?
Background Reading
Why did you come to University?
0Version History
Version / Date / Author / Notes1.0 / 7-02-17 / Ian Brown / Initial Version
Contents
0Version History
1Introduction
1.1This Document
1.2Poll Everywhere
1.3Audience Anonymity
1.4Bring Your Own Device
2Getting Set Up
2.1As a Participant
2.2As a Presenter
3Participating
3.1Browser Connection
3.2SMS Connection
3.3Twitter Connection
4Reports
4.1Gradebook report
4.2Segmentation report
5Surveys
6In Conclusion
1Introduction
1.1This Document
This document is a digest of much of the mechanical knowledge of Poll Everywhere gained through several years of use in Computer Gaming Technology. It serves as background reading for the Talk about Teaching seminar, Poll Everywhere: A lecturer’s panacea?, on the 16th February 2017, which will explore how these mechanisms can be used to effect a variety of classroom interventions.
1.2Poll Everywhere
Poll Everywhere ( is a service for running live audience participation activities. These take the form of multiple choice polls or votes, or more open questions that allow free text or positional answers. Recently, ranking and up-vote/down-vote question types have been added to the portfolio.
Rather than requiring the distribution of clickers or other custom hardware, this service adopts a ‘Bring your own device’ or BYOD approach. The assumption is that most students or conference delegates will have one or more of
- Laptop computer
- Tablet (iPad etc.)
- Smartphone
The service can even accept SMS text messages from ‘feature’ phones, or responses in Tweets.
Through either a browser window, or an installed app, the user can connect to the presenter’s account and partake in the activity.
1.3Audience Anonymity
Poll Everywhere gives the users effective anonymity. Unlike holding up hands, coloured cards and so forth, there is no indication to one’s peers of an individual’s answer, which can encourage the timid, or those who would be embarrassed by being wrong, to take part. If the results are concealed until the voting is over, the herd mentality effect, where late voters chose the ‘winning’ answer can also be avoided.
However, it is also possible to require that participants have a registered account with PollEverywhere, and to be logged in to that account when responding. In this case the presenter will be able to identify responses with respondents. This information is key for using Poll Everywhere for summative assessment or for correlating answers to several polls from an individual participant.
For particularly sensitive questions it is possible to force complete anonymity in the question settings. In this case, no identity information will be recorded, even if participants are logged in.
1.4Bring Your Own Device
The BYOD approach saves the organisers or establishment the hassle and cost of distributing custom hardware.
A potentially significant issue therefore is a delegate or student who forgets or who does not have an appropriate device has no way of interacting with Poll Everywhere. In the millennial generation this is hardly ever an issue, but in previous generations, the technology is less ubiquitous.
Another consideration is that if a room does not have good Wi-Fi connectivity then the app and browser connections to Poll Everywhere may be lost, and participants must fall back on 4G, 3G or SMS connections from their phones.
2Getting Set Up
2.1As a Participant
You can register with Poll Everywhere as a participant in this seminar by going to
You can use this same URL even if you are already registered with Poll Everywhere, and you will be added to the group for the seminar.
2.2As a Presenter
If you want to present using Poll Everywhere you can contact to be added to the University’s account.
3Participating
When a presenter is using Poll Everywhere, the instructions for connecting to the session will be displayed at the top of each poll. These will almost always include a web address (URL) made up of ‘pollev.com’ and the user’s account name, such as
PollEv.com/ianbrown
3.1Browser Connection
Participants should connect to the URL shown with their browser if using a smartphone, tablet or laptop. If participants need to be registered to take part, this would be when they should log in.
The presenter can ‘push’ a poll or survey to this page and it will appear on each connected device. A clear interface is presented to the user allowing them to simply click on the option chosen.
3.1.1Question Compatibility
The following question types are compatible with browser connections
- Multiple Choice
- Word Cloud
- Q&A
- Rank Order[1]
- Clickable Image
- Open Ended
3.2SMS Connection
If SMS text responses are allowed, a message will be displayed on the poll saying
Text a KEYWORD to 020 3322 5822
On each answer, a short code or number will be displayed to the right of the answer text, by texting this code to the above number, that response will be swiftly registered.
In the case of a written response, the user texts the code followed by their message.
It is possible to participate as a registered participant if your telephone number has been recorded and verified on your Poll Everywhere account ahead of sending the text.
These texts are charged at the national rate, on many pay monthly contracts they will incur no additional fees as a result.
3.2.1Question Compatibility
The following question types are compatible with SMS connections
- Multiple Choice
- Word Cloud
- Open Ended
3.3Twitter Connection
If the presenter has allowed it, responses can also be sent by Tweeting. If this is the case, instructions on the poll will say
Tweet @poll with a KEYWORD
This works almost identically to sending an SMS text, except that Twitter is used.
In order to take part in registered participant only polls, the user must have registered their twitter account name with their Poll Everywhere account.
3.3.1Question Compatibility
The following question types are compatible with Tweet responses
- Multiple Choice
- Word Cloud
- Open Ended
4Reports
Poll Everywhere’s core features can make for a lively presentation, immediate assessment of understanding and formative feedback. The less obvious reports functionality allows it to be used for summative evaluation, competitions, and data collection.
When generating a report, multiple polls can be included, whether as a group or survey, or as individually ticked selections. The two most commonly used reports are the Gradebook and Segmentation report.
4.1Gradebook Report
When creating or editing a multiple choice or clickable image question, the presenter has the option to mark one or more answers as correct[2].The gradebook report will list all participants and give them a grade based on their responses to the selection of questions chosen. Questions which are not marked as having correct answers do not contribute to the Grade, but do contribute to a Participation percentage. This report, in combination with a survey (see section 5 below), allows the tool to be used for an MCQ, which could be used as a mock or even summative test.
4.2Segmentation Report
The segmentation report is a summary view of the responses to a set of questions, as divided by the results of one of those questions. This is ideal for a team based competition, for example, as you can set the first question of the session to be ‘Which team are you on’. The results can then be displayed segmented by team, and the number and percentage of correct responses by the team can be seen.
Note that the segmenting poll must be a multiple choice, or the segments will be simple ‘responded’ and ‘no response’.
5Surveys
Poll Everywhere can be used to run online surveys. Polls can be grouped together from the Polls page, and these groups can then be converted to surveys. A survey automatically has a URL which you can share with your target audience.
Recently, the ability to run surveys live has been introduced. It is now possible to ‘push’ a survey to your audience much as an individual poll could be. This allows participants to complete the questions in their own time, and the results can be reviewed later. Anecdotally this approach results in higher response rates than the shared URL approach.
By linking a sequence of questions together, the tool can be used for data collection in a very similar way to services like Survey Monkey.
6In Conclusion
Poll Everywhere has become a powerful and multi-talented tool for interacting with audiences both live and asynchronously. Its features now allow for formative and summative assessment, fun competitions, emergent and peer teaching activities and more. The accompanying presentation will explore some of the ways this toolbox can be used applied to the issues facing lecturers today.
1
[1] It should be noted that students have reported that the ranking question type does not work on all smartphones, so should be avoided unless all participants are using computers or tablets.
[2] The logic applied to determine if an answer was correct is very basic. If a respondent selected a correct answer, their answer to the correction is 100% right, even if the question has multiple right answers and they are allowed to respond more than once. Therefore there is no inherent support for ‘pick 2 out of 4’ type questions.