Poll Everywhere is an event management software system offered by Poll Everywhere.
$42
per month
Top Hat
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Toronto-based Top Hat offers their higher education teaching apps, comprising Top Hat Classroom supporting flipped classroom and gamified lessons, Top Hat Textbook for delivering course content, Top Hat Assignment for customizable quizzes and graded tasks or homework, and Top Hat Test for delivering secure tests with auto-grading and reporting.
It's very handy in a classroom style setting. I'm interested in playing around with other features such as word clouds and other voting methods in order to catalyze more webinar discussion and participation. I think that it is a useful tool in enhancing and supplementing presentations, though with that said, it's only really handy when presenting new information or making a point in real time. Some business-related scenarios don't really lend themselves well to live response and too much of this I think could get distracting from an actual lecture or presentation (since you're ENCOURAGING attendees to be on their phones/computers).
Easy to use and get up and running. You can quickly set up a poll everywhere question or survey in a matter of minutes.
Fun and creative. Poll Everywhere allows users to interact via text message on their phone or through the web app/site. Great for student engagement.
Saves the results. One of the best features is that you can take the results from the poll or survey away with you to check back on at a later date. This is perfect for teachers to be able to assess and modify their lessons.
The initial rollout of Top Hat was not without its issues. Top Hat was very responsive, and even sent representatives to be onsite during the first couple of days of the start of class to help instructors and students. They were very knowledgeable about the product, but the sales team was pushy at times. At several times, we had to inform them not to reach out to instructors directly to pitch their service while we were still piloting.
Qualtrics- Great data collection tool for emails or websites with a lot of question logic and back end analytics. But it takes time and planning to set up, the UI is not particularly strong, especially on the back end data. It is better for people who understand excel and parsing large quantities of data. No PPT or LMS integration. Google Polls - Pretty basic tool, not very engaging or fun. Doesn't have any of the features like Word Clouds or Competitions. Lack of LMS integration. Top Hat - Not as good in really any way. The student pay subscription model was a deal-breaker for me.
Top Hat generally stacks up pretty well against other industry leading or popular learning management systems. Top Hat is comparable to learning management systems used in most educational institutions. The features such as allowing the educator to create an interactive experience by leveraging tools such as quizzes and polls is comparable. Data on student performance is also a helpful feature that is comparable to that of other similar learning management systems.
We were facing an unplanned $20k yearly expense if we had stayed with our previous clicker provider
Poll Everywhere made it so we did not have to increase student fees or find another way to fund the initiative; we had enough in current fees to cover the usage
In pilots, students preferred using Poll Everywhere to clickers
