Poll Your Students 2

In a student-centered classroom, gathering their feedback is absolutely essential. Online polls give you a quick avenue to send one or multiple questions to your online classroom. In turn, students can answer under cover of anonymity or not, within seconds. Let’s look at why you should poll your students and some of the easiest tools you can use to accomplish this task.

Why Poll Your Students?

In MYP Design students are asked to do primary research on a topic. There are a few ways to do this, but conducting a survey seems to be the favorite for students.

This article was inspired by a request for me to find information about polling options for a staff meeting. Using a poll in a meeting will not only get you the feedback that is wanted, but also will engage those in attendance and move them from passive information receiver to active participant.

Polls and surveys can be used in many ways in the classroom as well. You can use them for student feedback on:

• what they want to learn
• if they understand
• where they want to go

The data gathered from these can be used as formative assessment, data gathering, or to facilitate discussion.

Tools to Poll Your Students

The following is a short list of tools you can use to poll your students.

Poll Your Students

Socrative
With Socrative, teachers (the poller) need an account, but the audience doesn’t. The audience can type in the poll URL and can vote from a browser with no download needed. There is also a feature where you can have a list of questions, and the audience votes on those most important to them.
Kahoot
Kahoot is built more for younger students but works with any age level. As with Socrative above, the poller needs an account, but the audience can simply go to a URL to take the survey.

Poll Maker
Poll Maker is a tool that allows you to make surveys or quizzes with live results. The poll function only allows for a single-question poll, but using the quiz maker is another way to make a survey with multiple questions.

Google Forms
Google Forms is another way to take surveys. You can get instant feedback from the results tab along with graphs to visualize the data.

Google Classroom
There is now a way to survey students in Google Classroom. After clicking on the plus at the bottom, select question. The results of the poll are shown in the teacher’s account which can be projected for the class.

Twitter
Twitter requires both you and your students to have a Twitter account. Twitter is a way to get results from many people all over the world.