PollEverywhere: Trevor Sweatman, College of Medicine

“Poll Everywhere offers great flexibility in the manner in which you employ it. A large number of templates are provided for easy construction of such things as classical multiple choice, word cloud, clickable image etc. They are well worth “exploring” if your content aligns with such formats. I have only used multiple choice, free response, and word cloud formats because they conform best with my session objectives.

Many of us became all too familiar with the Zoom instant poll application. Using Poll Everywhere in a comparable manner has merit if, like me, you use clinical vignette questions that occupy many lines of text, or your answer choices are sentence-based rather than single word answers. I construct my questions in PowerPoint with appropriate illustration and use a generic “my answer is…A, B, C, D” Poll Everywhere question to ascertain student response. The intended answer is highlighted on the slide, and I convey the poll outcome to the class. The generic question is used repeatedly by simply resetting with the “clear responses” button.

I also use Poll Everywhere to record attendance at mandatory events by asking students to respond to the question “what number is showing on the screen”. The response file is simple to download and easy to format for need. In fact, the reporting options of the Poll Everywhere software are one of its significant strengths and take but a few seconds to learn.”