4 Polling Apps Every Classroom Can Benefit From

In a class comprising 50 students, it is quite likely that you, as a teacher, find it nerve-wracking to determine whether your students have actually understood the topic you just taught. A mere show of only a couple of hands for a general question like, “How many of you have not understood the concept?” does not, in most cases, reveal the truth. Worse comes to worst, not a single hand shoots up!

Some students are more vocal about their problems and the rest get overshadowed by them. Some are outgoing and some are introverts. This makes it quite difficult to find out how much of the lesson your class has really understood.

With classroom interaction taking over the traditional teaching methods, education is no longer a one-way street. Student engagement is the new lesson plan. And technology has, once again, made it possible to make this a success by introducing polling tools to measure learning.

These tools can be used to draw feedback from students that are more complete, clear and does justice to every student’s opinion. Long story short, there are scores of tools that you can implement in your classroom to initiate polling. In this article, we are going to shed some light on some of these.

Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is an extremely useful app for polling in the classroom and has drawn commendable reviews from teachers worldwide. You need to create an account in this app to start using it. The next step is to create quizzes and deploy them to your students.

Your students can send real-time feedback right from their devices through this app, send the responses via messages or even tweet their answers on Twitter. These answers can then be embedded into a PowerPoint presentation and displayed in real time. Therefore, this app makes it easy for you to track the performance of your students.

Here’s a great news: for a class of 30 students or less, this app is absolutely free and provides endless scope for real-time polling in the classroom.

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Socrative Teacher

The Socrative app is an online student response system that allows teachers to create polls and quizzes. You can start with a single question, a long quiz, multiple-choice questions, true/false questions and so on. This is a single-response system wherein students can reply to the questions you put up for polling, with their answers from any device.

If any response is incorrect, you can immediately, revert back with your insights. This way, you can easily locate scopes for further and more detailed instruction and plan your next lessons accordingly.

Since this is a cloud-based platform, once you create an account, you can access it from anywhere.

Polldaddy

Polldaddy is one of the renowned apps that has hit a home-run in the polling domain. Its user-friendly interface allows you to create polls and surveys with ease. If you have a class website, you can embed these polls there or, you can email them to your students or, even post them on Facebook. And then there’s obviously the option to deploy the poll via the app itself.

Polldaddy has broken free from convention and made polling creative. It enables you to create stunning pie-charts and bar graphs to showcase the results of a poll. You can choose from the 19 pre-loaded styles for the poll widget or create your own.

Survey Maker

The Survey Maker app allows you to create simple and effective surveys in seconds. Once you have the list of questions ready, you can post these on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter or, send them across via email, text messages or even links. The responses will start arriving in seconds. The feedback will start pouring in in real-time and you will be able to collect this data right from your iPhone or iPad.

The answers will arrive even when you are offline. As soon as you go online, the app immediately syncs these offline responses with the system and queues them up for you to go through individually. It also accommodates push notifications for each response that your receive. These ensure that you do not miss out any feedback.

These apps are wonderfully effective to ease polling into your classroom. They have been instrumental in taking student polling to the next level. These are absolutely hassle-free and are easy to set up. All you need is a working Internet connection.