Google Slides is a presentation tool that enables users to create, edit, collaborate, and present. It is free for personal use, and available to businesses via a Google Workspaces subscription.
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Poll Everywhere
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Poll Everywhere is an event management software system offered by Poll Everywhere.
Well-suited to working on presentations or PowerPoint-style documents, including setting up templated slides and working collaboratively on presentations. It's less well-suited to setting up printable documents, though I have used it for simple printable documents, you just need to remember to set the slide size to A4 (or your preferred paper size) measurements.
The reasons to use Poll Everywhere: 1. Get rid of those clickers! They eat batteries, need constant maintenance, and ofter walk off at a monetary loss. 2. The pricing model is really easy to manage, the campus/company license will pay for itself even if you only have 5-10 active users. 3. Stop fighting mobile devices in your classroom and start leveraging them. Students can't mess around on social media, texting etc if they are in the PE app. Then situations where Poll Everywhere wouldn't work as well: 1. Not great for multiple part, asynchronous polling, or data collection 2. Areas where there is a limited or absent internet connection. 3. Situations where an audience would lack basic technology such as a cell phone or laptop.
It's deceptively simple to use. Showing how to use the features, create & modify questions, and viewing polling data, is much easier than it first seems.
There are a surprising amount of alternate ways to poll users and present questions in more ways than just "Question and 2-4 possible answers." It's pretty easy to customize.
It's very, very, very easy to use as an attendee. There's not anything complex or invasive in order to sign in and vote in polls.
The popularity for Google Slides among the casual technology tool users is so great that we are not in a position to replace this tool with anything else. Every other tool either doesn't have the popularity, or doesn't match the ease of sharing level of Slides. The training needed to learn a different tool is too great. Google Slides is very easy to pick up and master.
Google Slides is very easy and intuitive for creating simple, straightforward presentations. Its limitations make for less decision making. Being part of the Google Suite makes for easy sharing and collaboration, auto-saving, and time-stamped versions/edit history. However, unlike a platform like Canva, there's no icon library, photos, graphics, or elements built-in, so if you're wanting more creative designs, you have to import or create yourself.
Google Slides works both online and offline, they are free to use if you have a Google account. Easy to share and are supported by most web browsers. A great addition to your arsenal of interactive educational online platforms.
Other than Google Forms (which I utilize heavily, but for different reasons and during different areas) I find Poll Everywhere to be the best at what it offers and does. Options to lock questions, hide or show responses, varying questions/response types, and the ability to let users respond via text message on their phone or through the website/app increase the functionality of the program. The is also the ability to be creative and change poll/question backgrounds, colors and layouts as well as attach/embed images.
