Free online voting system, Poll Everywhere has introduced Twitter and PowerPoint functionality to its service making it now possible for users to tweet their responses anonymously in real time and have them displayed on a webpage, in a slideshow or as an embedded widget.
At first glance, this new feature creates a number of exciting possibilities for teachers and trainers. For example in the classroom, Poll Everywhere could
- facilitate personalised learning opportunities and pupil voice
- remove the need to purchase an expensive classroom response system
- help students collaborate with each other and with a partner school
- display live feedback from a teacher's Personal Learning Network and promote intercultural understanding
- be used to model dialogues or short texts put together by the class with a class set of netbooks, in a computer suite or by using mobile phones
Likewise, in a conference session, the voting tool could
- encourage debate by offering a visual backchannel where the audience can text or tweet their thoughts to the presenter. This could include answers from around the world if the session was being streamed live
- reinforce connected thinking and intercultural understanding of universal issues we all face in education
If Twitter is blocked in your school, pupils can vote via the web without the need to register or post their names online. The number of polls you can make is always unlimited even in the free version and you can generate an RSS feed of the results too if you want. Do note though, you need to have PowerPoint 2007 to display votes. I can see the multiple choice poll being useful for topics such as brothers and sisters, hair and eyes, sports, pets etc.
Expect this to be big in the edublogosphere!
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