Classroom Polling on the Net

One of the better sessions I attended at the EdTech conference was presented by Jeff Nugent of a Commonwealth University. It was on classroom polling. Jeff was concerned with showing us the uses of polling and not merely how to do it. To do this he had us become students in order to demonstrate how polling makes student’s thinking visible, and therefore can be used for formative assessments. We also experienced how it could be used for peer instruction and mass
collaboration.

We each came into the classroom with a mobile pad, laptop, or cellphone with texting capacity. We went to the website polleverywhere.com. Jeff had the following question displayed: If two glasses of water are filled to the same level, but, one has ice cubes in it, which glass of water will have a higher level once the ice melts? We clicked on our responses (or texted in a response) and as we did a bar graph appeared—responding to each answer as it came in. The next question we responded to was; “How confident are you of your answer?” After giving us a moment to respond, Jeff asked us to “convince your neighbor.” Following which we were polled again on the original question.

This was a quick way to get us thinking about a science lesson, not just listening to a teacher explain the answer, but doing some analysis, building arguments, listening to others, reasoning, etc. It really made for a high interest lesson. If you're interested in using something like this, let your friendly ITRT know, or simply go to "polleverywhere.com" and create a poll for yourself.

There are several other similar sites I’ve looked at this school year, some of which also enable a teacher to have a “backchannel discussion” going on during class. But, I’ll tell you more about those sites in some future blog.