PollEverywhere

PollEverywhere is a classroom response system that can help faculty can promote engagement and interactivity in their classes. For instructors who use PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides, poll questions can be integrated into their slide deck and made to appear at the desired point in the presentation. Students respond to questions posed by their professor with their mobile devices: smartphones, laptops, or tablets. Responses are collected on PollEverywhere’s cloud-based platform and the results are displayed in real time via the web.

PollEverywhere is used in a variety of disciplines, such as Religion, Economics, Biology and Physics.

Some of the most common polling strategies include:

• Formative assessment: posing questions in class after covering key concepts to gauge the level of student understanding
• Review: posing questions at the beginning of a class to determine the level of understanding of assigned readings
• Summative assessment: graded quizzes, polls and surveys. These can also be available online for student review with the correct answers indicated
• Discussion warmup: posting a question as the lead-in to a class-wide discussion
• Repeated questions: students are polled twice, once when the question is first posed and then again after discussing the question with a neighbor
• Anonymous polls: can be used in small or large classes to ask controversial questions that students might be uncomfortable answering verbally

Middlebury has a limited number of paid licenses with PollEverywhere. There is also a free version, if you’d like to try it out on your own. Faculty should contact DLINQ to express interest in getting access to a license.