Poll Everywhere

With Stanford's Poll Everywhere license, Stanford faculty, staff, and students have a powerful web-based, smart device and SMS text-friendly audience response system at their fingertips that can support interactive classroom instruction and real-time student engagement.

Launch Stanford Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere features

Looking for an icebreaker to gauge students' feelings on a topic? Try asking a question and having students respond with one-word answers, which appear on screen in a word cloud. For more formal sentiment analysis, use Poll Everywhere's Likert scale questionnaires. To engage students further, consider open-ended questions for short answer qualitative feedback, Q&A sessions for direct inquiries, or clickable image activities for visual interaction. Multiple choice surveys can also be useful without correct answers, allowing you to survey staff or students on preferences (such as lunch options) or build consensus for collective decision-making. These tools offer various ways to interact with your audience and gather valuable feedback.

• Embed polls in slide presentations like PowerPoint and Google Slides.
• Set up a Team so you can delegate to a TA or Head TA the responsibility for polling and reporting on polls in your course.
• Sync your Poll Everywhere account with Canvas so you can register students and force them to authenticate before taking your polls.
• Anonymous polling
• Response moderation to screen responses before displaying them on the screen
• Widely used on campus means easy onboarding for new users
• The Poll Everywhere app for Android and iPhone is easy to download and can be used by many students at once in a classroom

Artificial intelligence features

Poll Everywhere has a "Create with AI" option on the Activities Dashboard. This provides a text box where you can prompt generative AI to create a multiple-choice poll or other activity.

Access Poll Everywhere

All Stanford students can use their SUNet credentials to log in to Poll Everywhere and automatically create a participant account associated with their SUNet. This allows them to respond to restricted polls, and their responses can be recorded (typically in Canvas).

Faculty, instructors, and staff can also use their SUNet credentials to log in and automatically create a presenter account. Presenters can create and facilitate poll activities, share polls, generate reports, and more. Students, postdocs, fellows, and other staff can upgrade to a presenter account by emailing academictechnology@stanford.edu.

Non-Stanford users can only respond to unrestricted polls or must independently create their own Poll Everywhere account.

Getting started with Poll Everywhere

The best place to start is at the Canvas Course. Self-enroll at: https://canvas.stanford.edu/enroll/X9X46T. 

For students

Students can respond to polls online or in-class, with or without logging into accounts, directly from their laptops, tablets, or smartphones. If students download the small Poll Everywhere app (available for download on iPhones and Android), this will store the URL to take polls, and the app remembers their web authentication in the future. Alternatively, every poll displays a QR code and the URL on the screen at the front of the classroom, so students can find it easily in a browser.

NOTE: Students don’t need full Presenter accounts to take polls, so they should only request Presenter accounts if they are a TA, sharing research or presenting at a conference with polls, or have staff responsibilities that require polling or helping with polls.

For instructors

Most faculty automatically receive a full Presenter license to Poll Everywhere. If you log into polleverywhere.com with your SUNetID@stanford.edu, navigate to your Profile, then at the bottom near the save button, you should see a message stating “You are on the FTE university-wide Plan. You are a presenter on Stanford University’s account.”

If you DON’T have a full Presenter account yet, you can request one by emailing academictechnology@stanford.edu or visiting pollev.stanford.edu. You can also email this account for a consultation or tutorial (bring your TAs!) on how to use more advanced features in Poll Everywhere. The answers to the most common questions faculty ask (below) are available on the Canvas course https://canvas.stanford.edu/enroll/X9X46T. 

Comparison to similar tools

Because Poll Everywhere can be used asynchronously in surveys, it is less robust and secure but a much easier-to-use tool than Qualtrics. Zoom also contains a polling tool, and with Harmonize, polling can be done directly in Canvas, but these lack the many options and versatility in reporting available in Poll Everywhere.

Pedagogy and best practices with Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is useful for engaging and motivating students. We recommend asking a difficult multiple-choice question with the correct answer indicated. This can motivate students to understand why their answer was correct or incorrect, especially if the poll is followed up by an explainer or is used as a launch pad for the lecture. Similarly, you might use a difficult question that has no correct answer. An in-class discussion of the question can encourage students to examine why there is disagreement, and they must think hard to justify their own opinions with evidence and careful argumentation. Other question types, like open-ended, wordcloud, or ranking, can also be useful to engage students.

Poll Everywhere can also be used to track students' responses for attendance, participation grading, or comprehension checks. First, restrict the poll to only students enrolled in the specific course by syncing the roster in Canvas with the participant list in Poll Everywhere. Then set the poll access to registered participants only. This will force students to sign in before responding to the poll. Their response is recorded and can be exported directly into the Canvas Gradebook. Recently, geofencing was also added to check if students taking a poll are actually in the classroom.

Faculty have also found innovative ways of preparing and following up on lectures with asynchronous surveys, staging competitions as exam preparation, voting on final projects, or even for safety training for lab equipment using the clickable image poll activity. Use cases are listed in more detail in the Poll Everywhere course in Canvas. Stanford-affiliates can self-enroll at https://canvas.stanford.edu/enroll/X9X46T. 

Questions?

For technical support and troubleshooting related to Poll Everywhere, contact support@polleverywhere.com. 

For consultative support about pedagogy, course design, and integrating technology into your teaching practice, please email academictechnology@stanford.edu.