Embrace Smart Phones and Engage Your Audience with Poll Everywhere
Pros
- No need to distribute or account for 'clickers' -- PollEverywhere works with any device, even an old fashioned flip phone
- Because the polls are URL based you can engage with both an in-person and remote audience at the same time
- PPT Integration is very easy, even for novice technical users
- Analytics are strong, if you choose to require registration you can really drill down on where certain responses are coming from
- Innovation -- Poll Everywhere is always rolling out new features and poll types. The most recent feature of group 'competitions' can add a fun gaming element to any class or event.
Cons
- While you can technically embed a poll into a website on LMS, the features are rather limited. Embedding multiple polls in different sites/courses from one account has been problematic. Users tend to default to something like Google Polls or Qualtrix instead
- GradeCenter integration with our LMS (Blackboard) while possible, is not as robust as we'd like to see
- Some of our users have felt limited by the only being able to do one poll at a time. We have not found a great way to collect multiple polls at once or to create user-paced polls
- Managing groups of users (in our case classes) using the same poll set can be cumbersome.
Return on Investment
- The most obvious financial advantage is not having to account for the physical clickers and batteries
- Because of the PPT integration, training and IT support is minimal
- Because of the campus/organizational license, our students have spaced any subscription or device costs. The app, etc is completely free for end users.



