Embrace Smart Phones and Engage Your Audience with Poll Everywhere
January 18, 2019

Embrace Smart Phones and Engage Your Audience with Poll Everywhere

Mark Nowowiejski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere has been an effective presentation and audience engagement tool across my organization and has been found to be effective for use in the classroom, online and in staff facing events and training. It is extremely easy to use and it integrates well with existing Powerpoints. Because of its 'Bring Your Own Device' model, the pre and post event setup is very minimal. If you are a speaker or educator who gets frustrated with your audience constantly getting distracted by their smartphones you will find this to be an excellent tool to leverage.

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.
  • 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.
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.
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.


Comments

More Reviews of Poll Everywhere

  1. Home
  2. Event Management Software
  3. Poll Everywhere Reviews
  4. User Review of Poll Everywhere