What Is Poll Everywhere?
Poll Everywhere is the University’s student polling solution. It is a tool for engaging students, gathering responses, reviewing answers, and real-time polling. Since it is not hardware-based, it can be used with any internet-enabled device. It seamlessly integrates with laptops, tablets, and smartphones. It can also export poll answers back into Canvas, allowing you to incorporate it into your class grades.
Why Use Poll Everywhere?
While Canvas does have Quizzes and built-in survey tools of its own, Poll Everywhere offers live, real-time classroom audience polling capabilities. Poll Everywhere also offers greater ease of use and less administrative management compared to the University’s previous classroom polling solution, iCLICKER. Furthermore, Poll Everywhere does not require students to buy expensive physical clickers, since it leverages web-based software. You can use it from anywhere in the world as long as you have a stable internet connection.
Ways to leverage Poll Everywhere include:
- Engage with each student in the classroom
- Check to see whether students understood a concept before moving on
- Use it for low-stakes, formative assessments
How Can You Use Poll Everywhere at UChicago?
During the pilot phase faculty successfully leveraged the engagement strategies above and used Poll Everywhere to start off student discussions, to review for quizzes, to gather student questions about difficult problems, and, of course, to get to know their students better. Faculty have used Poll Everywhere:
- In small classrooms
- In large classrooms
- Outside of the classroom
For more information, please see our Use Cases page.