I’ve been looking for a tool that would allow you to poll and embed those polls within webpages. Something that would allow you to do on-the-fly formative assessment kind of things. I think I found just the thing with Poll Everywhere. While there is (like a lot of these tools) a paid subscription level of membership, it does (again like most others of these Web2.0 tools) provide a good deal of functionality for free. This includes something like 100 votes for free.

What’s great about Poll Everywhere is it provides a Flash file URL version that can be embedded into a PowerPoint presentation. Ample support documentation has been provided outlining how to do this.

Here’s an example of how you can link to a poll.

The resulting data is arranged for you in nice, clean looking graphs.

The other cool feature of Poll Everywhere is that respondants can submit their answers via cell phone. They just text a given code. Could essentially transform a cell phone into a valid student response system. Let’s start using those things for the power of good.

Now because you only get the first 100 votes for free, I think this would be good to use for one or two limited polls on your blog or homework page or course website. However, I’ve read over on Teach42 that the developers of Poll Everywhere are currently eyeballing the education market, so we should see some better features for classroom integration. This one isn’t at the top of my list, but its worth being aware of. Certainly a cool tool.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 12:10 am and is filed under Cool Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.