What Is Poll Everywhere

“What is Poll Everywhere?”

On the surface, Poll Everywhere is a simple application that works well for live audiences using mobile devices like phones. People participate by visiting a fast mobile-friendly web page for your event or sending text messages. Instructions are displayed on-screen. The poll that is embedded within the presentation or web page will update in real time.

​Advanced uses include gamified competitions and embedding Poll Everywhere questions into your PowerPoint presentation.

“What can I do with Poll Everywhere?”

You can use Poll Everywhere to break up your lectures and seminars with a live activity where students respond to poll questions in real time and the answers come up on the screen as they are given. This introduces a gamified element to the session encouraging students, particularly those resistant to more traditional approaches, to engage with the session.

Poll Everywhere can also be used to created interactive competitions, where students compete against each other to answer a series of multiple-choice questions correctly and in a quicker time than their peers. At the end of each question, a score board is shown and names move up and down this scoreboard each round, depending on the score each user has achieved.

Poll Everywhere can be used by all staff the University, however you must request access to the platform from the Digital Education team. Students do not need an account to access Poll Everywhere, they can respond to polls from a web browser on their mobile phone, iPad, tablet or laptop device. In some cases students can also respond via SMS message.

Student accounts can be set up in specific circumstances where keeping data on individual student response (such as during an assessed project) would be useful. If you are planning to use Poll Everywhere on a regular basis throughout a module and wish to track student progress, registered accounts may also be appropriate. The Digital Education team can set these accounts up for you via your Blackboard site. Please get in touch if this would be of interest to you.

Key concepts and terminology

Poll: Live question which users can respond to within Poll Everywhere. There are many types.

Competition: Different to a poll, a competition is a series of multiple-choice questions which make up a gamifed competition in which students challenge each other to be correct, and quickest to respond.

Survey: Poll Everywhere can also be used as a survey tool. Although each respondent can only respond once and any survey is not designed to be live, rather it should be sent out via email to all participants.

Reports: The reports section of Poll Everywhere, lets you see reports on all polls you have run and lets you review student progress via registered accounts on a period of weeks.