Poll Everywhere Introduces Voting on Images

Earlier this week the popular survey service Poll Everywhere released a very nice update, support for images and equations. Now you can put images into your polls and have students vote on the images. Another part of this update is the option to include mathematics equations in polls. The video below provides an overview of the updates.

Image Support for Multiple Choice Options from Poll Everwhere on Vimeo.


Applications for Education
The image voting option could be a good way to create surveys or polls in which you ask students to identify plants, animals, and other objects. The mathematics inclusion option will allow you to create multiple choice polls in which students have to select the correct equation.

Pinnion - Targeted Audience Polling Through Mobile Devices and Your Website

One of last week's most popular posts was this list of 11 web-based polling services. Pinnion is another good service to add to that list. Pinnion is a tool that you can use to survey your audience through your website, blog, or through mobile devices.

Using Pinnion you can create multiple surveys using multiple question formats. Your survey can be distributed to a specific audience through Pinnion's channel service (you create the channels) or you can cast a wide net and gather responses from anyone who visits your website or blog. Pinnion offers Android and iPhone apps for gathering feeback. A sample Pinnion poll is embedded below.

Applications for Education
Our students carry a variety of mobile devices that we can use to gather feedback from them. Pinnion makes it easy to gather that feedback from students using Android and iOS devices. And if they have neither OS on their mobile devices, the web version of Pinnion surveys is quite mobile friendly.

11 Web-based Polling and Survey Tools

Yesterday, I wrote a short post about Kwiqpoll. After that post was published I got a few requests for suggestions about other web-based polling/ survey tools. Here are eleven other ways you can conduct polls and surveys online.

MicroPoll makes it very easy to create a poll, customize it, and embed it into your blog or website. To use MicroPoll just enter your question, enter answer choices, and enter your email address. After completing those first three steps you can preview your poll, change the theme (look) of your poll, and get the embed code for your poll.

Flisti is a free and easy-to-use polling tool. Registration is not required in order to create a poll with Flisti. In fact, registering doesn't seem to be an option at all. To create a poll using Flisti just enter your question, specify some answer choices, then click "create new poll." Your poll(s) can be embedded into your blog, website, or wiki.

Quiz Snack offers a free service for creating polls and quizzes to post in your blog or website. To use Quiz Snack you can sign in with your Twitter, Facebook, Google, or Quiz Snack account. Then select one of three poll/quiz formats, type your question(s) and answer choices, and select a template. Then copy the embed code provided by Quiz Snack and place it your blog or website.

Pollmo is a free service offering an easy way to create and post simple polls online. Getting started with Pollmo is easy. Just head to their site, type your question, type your response choices, and select a color theme for your poll. Then just copy the embed code provided to place your poll on your blog or website. Don't have a blog or website? Then just direct people to the url assigned to your Pollmo poll.

Urtak is a free and simple polling service that can be used on any blog or website. The polls you create can have multiple questions, but they must be "yes or no" questions. But Urtak isn't that limited because visitors to your poll also have the option of writing in their own questions. You can get started using Urtak in seconds by registering with your Twitter or Facebook account. You can also use your email address to create an account with Urtak. Urtak polls can be embedded into your blog or you can direct people to your poll by sharing the unique url Urtak assigns to your poll.

Using Yarp you can create a simple one question survey or one line event invitation. To create a Yarp survey select "survey" on the homepage, type a question, then select your answer format. All answer formats present only two options along the lines of "true or false" or "yes or no." Yarp invitations use the same format styles as Yarp surveys.

Vorbeo is a free service for creating polls for your blog or website. To use Vorbeo just type your question, enter your answer choices, select a background color, and specify the width of your polling widget. Then copy the embed code provided by Vorbeo and paste it into the html editor of your blog or website.

Obsurvey gives you the flexibility to create multiple choice surveys or open-ended surveys. Setting up a survey with Obsurvey is an easy process. To set up a survey simply select your question format and then edit the questions and answer choices using the text editor. The video here shows you how to set-up Obsurvey.

Polldaddy is one of the most recognized platforms for online polling. The free Polldaddy plan allows you to create polls or surveys containing up to ten questions. Poll/ survey results are displayed in real-time.

Kwik Surveys is a free survey tool that offers a bunch of excellent options. Kwik Surveys gives you the option to mix and match eleven different types of questions. You can administer your survey by posting it on a blog, website, or discussion forum. You can also email your survey to the people you want to take it. If you choose the email option, you can track who has taken your survey and restrict respondents to taking the survey only once.

Using forms in Google Documents you can create a simple survey or poll, gather the data, and then select from any number of gadgets and scripts to create visualizations of that data. You can find directions for creating a survey here. If you're a Blogger user, Blogger has a poll gadget that you can customize and insert into the sidebar of your blog.

Kwiqpoll - Simple Web Polls

Kwiqpoll is a simple tool for quickly creating and posting polls. To create a poll with Kwiqpoll just visit the site, type a question, type your answer choices, and go. Your poll can stay online for three or seven days. Kwiqpoll assigns a unique url to each of your polls. Give that url to the audience that you want to participate in your poll. Here's the link to a simple poll that I made.

Applications for Education
Kwiqpoll could be a good tool for quickly gathering anonymous feedback from students on things like how long it took them to complete a homework assignment or how prepared they feel for an upcoming assessment.

H/T to Larry Ferlazzo.

Mentimeter - Poll Your Audience

Yesterday, in my Ed Tech Teacher webinar 30 Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers I demonstrated Socrative. Socrative is currently my favorite tool for using cell phones, tablets, and laptops to survey an audience. After the webinar I was contacted by a company called Mentimeter who offers a similar product.

Mentimeter allows you to pose a question to your audience and get instant feedback on that question through cell phones, tablets, and any other Internet-connected device. Mentimeter doesn't have has many features as Socrative or Poll Everywhere, but it is free and very easy to use. In the video below I provide a two minute demonstration of Mentimeter.



Applications for Education
If your school has been considering purchasing one of those expensive clicker response systems give Mentimeter and these three other alternatives a try before making a purchase.