3 Excellent Tools to Quickly Poll Your Students

February 25, 2015
The web is teeming with interesting tools that teachers can use to gather informal feedback from students. We have already reviewed several of the best options available out there and the last list we shared in this regard covered what we think are the top 8 tools for doing formative assessment in class. However, if you are looking for specific tools to create and conduct polls in class, the titles below are what we would recommend the most. These tools are very simple and easy to handle. You can use them to quickly poll your students, create surveys and establish the knowledge level of a class on a certain topic.

1- Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is a powerful web tool for creating and distributing polls. It offers you five types of polls to choose from: multiple choice poll, free response poll, true or false poll, clickable images poll, and discourse poll. Your respondents can vote on your poll either through SMS or via the web using the generated link you will provide them. Poll Everywhere also has a wonderful way of displaying the results of the poll. You can have the results displayed on a chart of bouncing bars.You can also present your polls as a seamless part of your PowerPoint or Keynote slideshow. Flip on through and instead of another flat picture, your respondents see your slide come alive with real time poll results.

2- AnswerGarden

AnswerGarden is another great tool to use for collecting feedback from students. This is how it works: you type in your question in Create New AnswerGarden page. When you hit ‘submit’ you will be directed to your newly created AnswerGarden page. From there you can share your page with others or embed it in your class blog or website. Respondents will have to either enter their answers or choose from existing ones.”If you're satisfied with the results, you can for instance show the AnswerGarden to your friends, tweet about it or export it to Wordle or Tagxedo.

3- PollDaddy

PollDaddy allows you to create unlimited surveys. You can choose from 14 question types, including multiple choice, free text, and Likert scales. Yo can also customize your surveys and change things such as font, size, colour…etc. Surveys created by Polleverywhere support the inclusion of multimedia materials such as images and videos. As is the case with Poll Everywhere, PollDaddy enables you to watch the results of your surveys in real time and you can expert these results in various formats : PDF, Excel, CSV, Google Docs, and XML.

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