Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Share a Poll Everywhere

I have been experimenting with Poll Everywhere. I started by adding polls to my mobile phones presentation for Midwest Education Technology Conference as an alternative for using mobile phones instead of “clickers” in the classroom. This has quickly evolved to adding polls to all my upcoming presentations, mostly in the form of KWL in poll format. Poll Everywhere is a simple text message voting application. When I signed up for an account a few months ago, I received 100 free votes. I have only used about 50 of my votes so far because I have found many of the people I have shared this with are not adept at using text messaging on their moble phone or are not willing to send a text message because then they’ll have to pay for it. Respondents can vote by text messaging with a mobile phone or by web voting from a computer. So far, I have found both to be very reliable.

Last week, when I was showing Poll Everywhere to some people at the University of Missouri, I noticed that Poll Everywhere’s pricing structure and subscriptions had changed. This morning I received an e-mail informing me that my free account which had originally included 100 free votes had automatically been changed to 1000 free votes and up to 30 per poll. The stated goal behind this from Poll Everywhere is that they want to “make a useful product that is free for K-12 educators.” Along with the new subscriptions came some other new features which make this application better and better.

With Poll Everywhere, you can embed your polls into PowerPoint as a Shockwave Flash Object. Accomplishing this is pretty simple. Poll Everywhere has both a HowTo video and step-by-step directions to help you. If you are using PowerPoint 2007, you can download a small .pptx file containing your poll. Either way, if you make a change to the poll on the website, it automatically updates the PowerPoint and your audience can see poll results from the website and/or your PowerPoint presentation in real time.

But the best part is that you can now share your polls on any website using the HTML embed code and copy and paste. Check it out. Click "Full Screen" to see casting numbers. Be sure to type CAST and the number associated with your answer in your text message. I'll be waiting.

2 comments:

Rebecca Hart said...

Very cool! My high school has been dealing with cell phone-related infractions, inappropriate text-messaging etc. But with this type of application, it seems like kids would really "buy in" to proper usage. Not to mention, if you let them use technology appropriately, they tend to not use it inappropriately. Thanks Karen!

Michal said...

Hi, here are some informations about PPTX. Nice day.

Babel Fish

DISCLAIMER

Karen Montgomery is the author of Gomeric Hill. The opinions expressed herein are mine and not necessarily those of my employer.