Become More Classroom Aware with By Maria Ripberger and Jen Witcik
At the end of a long teaching day, have you ever struggled to remember which classes grasped the material and which ones did not? Poll Everywhere allows you to instantly collect information from students via mobile phone, texts, and/or the Internet and to store the information for later review. This data is helpful in assessing student understanding and improving decision-making for class direction. Poll Everywhere is a free classroom response system that any educator can use to monitor student understanding. Teachers can encourage students to participate by using a technology tool that most students already possess: a cell phone via text message, Twitter, or the web. Thus, the teacher can quickly assess how students understand a concept or a topic in a low-risk, exciting manor, with instant feedback. The purpose of this article is to describe the key features of Poll Everywhere and to explain how this technology tool can be a valuable asset for teachers to use in their classroom to engage students, to track student or class progress, and to
modify instruction based on student feedback. SUMMARY OF POLL EVERYWHERE FEATURES Poll Everywhere is easy for teachers and students to use. Teachers can register for a free account at www.polleverywhere. com and create polls for their students to respond to during class. You choose what type of question you want to ask; multiple choice such as “What is your vacation subject?” or open response poll such as “What do you like about Chemistry?” As the poll creator, you are in total control of the poll features. You control
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when your poll is open to accept responses and can close it to prevent additional responses once you are finished with the poll. You can also choose whether to allow multiple responses from the same person or whether each student can only reply once. You control the response methods, choosing from text messages from mobile phones, tweets on Twitter, and voting via the Web. When working with open response text polls, you as the teacher have the ability to control in real-time which responses will be displayed on a public screen if you are sharing the information during class. This valuable feature is essential in a high school classroom.
Students are able to answer the poll by four different methods: sending a text by following the on screen instructions and texting a keyword to a code, using a Smartphone’s web browser, sending a “tweet” on Twitter, or on a computer via the web. This method engages students by using technology to which they already have access and are experts at using, and invites them to participate in classroom activities with low risk since their posts are anonymous. When Poll Everywhere receives responses, the results are instantly updated on animated charts for multiple- choice polls or on a text wall for free text polls. These charts are saved in your profile or downloaded to PowerPoint slides to review at your leisure, giving you insight on individual class progress that can be used to inform the direction of your next lesson.
PEDAGOGICAL USES FOR POLL EVERYWHERE Poll Everywhere can be used in numerous ways to accompany a lesson. It can be used to check student understanding, to quickly assess if students remember content covered in a previous lesson, to gauge how students are feeling about new content presented, or to activate prior knowledge. For example, a teacher could create a poll as part of a check-in and check-out classroom routine. To start a lesson, a teacher could ask a question-of- the-day regarding last night’s reading assignment or about the content taught on a previous day. Students then respond to the poll, and the teacher receives instant feedback concerning their current level of understanding. If the students don’t perform well on the poll, the teacher can spend additional time reviewing information that students did not fully comprehend. In a chemistry classroom, for instance, a check-in question could be: “How many protons, neutrons, and electrons are in the element Mercury (Hg)?” This check-in question could be checking student’s prior knowledge, asking students to remember something learned in a previous lesson, or asking students relate old ideas to a new concept.
As an end-of-the-lesson check-out (also called an exit ticket), a teacher could create a poll asking students about the content that was taught that day. In this way, a teacher can check if students
Spring/Summer 2011 | MACULJOURNAL
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