In-class polling

Instructors sometimes adopt in-class polling to using clickers because they want to substitute one chore with a bit of technology.

For example clickers used as a replacement for graded quizzes on paper. Still, others attempt to use it to take attendance by having the clicker responses act as stand-in for an old-fashioned rollcall.

There are other ways to tackle those two popular burdens on instructors. One example is qwickly, which can be used for attendance taking. For quizzes there is the course management system https://learn.rochester.edu/ has a tests and survey tool built-in. And best of all it's free!

Is swapping a chore with an instructional technology the best use of in-class polling? Probably not. Instead, why not use polling to address some big goals you might have?

Instructional Goals you may have in mind for your classroom teaching may include the following:

1. Quickly assess student comprehension of a particular topic
2. Improve student engagement in your classes through participation
3. Ask students for questions, in order to clarify and let them vote to pick which question to focus on
4. Use polling as a formative assessment tool (to help guide lessons for a specific topic or skill)

Instructional goals like these can be achieved through anonymous in-class polling. For those who would like to try anonymous polling, for free, here are 3 options:

1. Slido (free tier is limited to 3 polls per session)
2. Socrative (free tier is limited:50 students)

If your class size is too big, these free tiers of service will not work. Same is true if you don't want to do anonymous polling, but prefer to have each student response tied to actual student enrolled in your class. If you want student responses tied to a student ID, or if your class size exceeds the limits of the free tiers of service offered by these services, your only option is to use: Poll Everywhere