Pros and Cons of Poll Everywhere 2024 (2024)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Poll Everywhere is used by our organization for class instruction. It assists instructors to get information from students on certain topics.

Pros and Cons

• Class instruction

• Quiz

• Team building and group assignments

• Free option needs to add more options

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suitable for class assignments where you want the class to see other participant's responses. It may not be too great when you have only a few responses. I believe it is more useful when there are a larger amount of participants. Also, there needs to be internet access.

Return on Investment

• So far, the ROI is high because we utilize it frequently as an innovative way to engage students.

Alternatives Considered

Poll Everywhere has been magnificent for us so far. Students are more engaged and this works better us than clickers. Students can use their laptops and phones to provide their responses, therefore, they don't need to buy any additional devices.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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 and Cons

• 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.

• 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Alternatives Considered

• Qualtrics and Top Hat

Other Software Used

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We adopted Poll Everywhere institution-wide after it was used successfully by one of our schools. The need arose for a less expensive, device-agnostic audience polling device for student engagement and formative assessment - Poll Everywhere met that need. Faculty use Poll Everywhere in different ways, including to gauge readiness at the start of a class, to see where concepts might need clarified, and to engage students in discussion and class decision making.

Pros and Cons

• Stellar customer service/tech support

• User-friendly question creation (just a few clicks)

• Consistently making improvements based on user feedback

• Offers pretty robust free version that we can share with our teachers in training

• SSO integration could be a little smoother

• LMS grade integration requires many steps, sometimes frustrates faculty

• New quiz/gaming feature is still not as good as Kahoot - some technical issues in presentations

Likelihood to Recommend

Poll Everywhere might be a good fit for institutions that have historically relied on "clicker" devices, but are now faced with financial and administrative challenges as clicker companies move to cloud/subscription-based services. Poll Everywhere helped us out of a bind by offering a less expensive alternative and allowing us to rely on the devices most students already have in hand. We also collaborated with Poll Everywhere on usage ideas for users who do not own mobile devices; they helped us consider how we might use other university technology and methods to ensure no student misses out, regardless of what device they own.

Return on Investment

• 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

Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We primarily use Poll Everywhere as a tool in some of our real estate classes. We offer a number of courses via webinar, and are looking into expanding that and making our webinars more interactive, and Poll Everywhere has been one method that we've used in order to encourage participation and interaction among not just the attendees via webinar, but also with the instructor as well as students in the classroom being presented via webinar.

Pros and Cons

• 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.

• I wish it were easier to group and store reports of polls. That's one area, in terms of verifying a user has participated, that's a bit of a pain.

• In addition to my first point, I wish that when attendees vote via text, that they are required to put in a name much like the browser version. Part of how we use Poll Everywhere is to verify attendance and participation and this could be I think a little easier to do.

Likelihood to Recommend

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).

Return on Investment

• It's helped for us to give a good, interactive experience for students, that has potential for better utilization.

• There definitely needs to be a better balance for how it is used, because if this software is used too much in a presentation, it gets distracting from the actual material in the classroom. Too little and folks (on certain topics) find themselves bored and waiting to actually "do something."

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Poll Everywhere is being used throughout teachers in our school district to help with formative assessments, surveys, and student engagement issues in the classroom. I currently use Poll Everywhere for professional development purposes with teachers, to enhance the interaction between staff and I. I have recently seen teachers utilizing Poll Everywhere as Do Nows and Exit tickets, as well as check-ins throughout a lesson.

Pros and Cons

• 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.

• I can honestly say I like everything about Poll Everywhere. Its simplicity is a complete advantage over other programs.

• I actually like how users are anonymous when they respond. However, you can have users/students sign-in if you are running the premium version of Poll Everywhere.

Likelihood to Recommend

Poll Everywhere is well suited for Do Nows, exit tickets, SAT review, constant check-ins during a lesson/activity, in formal assessments, surveys, and areas for student voice. It is not a formal program in which you should expect quiz/formal test like features. I have utilized Poll Everywhere in the English class while reading and analyzing a text. It affords students a backchannel to respond to questions and understandings, while voicing their opinion, and being able to defend their reasoning/examples to others.

Return on Investment

• Enhanced interaction during lessons

• Increased student engagement

• Increased opportunities for student voice

Alternatives Considered

• Socrative, exit ticket and Google Forms

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.

Other Software Used