Great way to gain formative feedback and keep students feeling comfortable!
Community Review for Poll Everywhere
My Take
As a teaching tool, I think that Poll Everywhere is very effective for gaining formative feedback from students, and students are often very engaged in this activity. However, it is not always user-friendly and can take a bit of time to figure out how to set it up. Many features also require subscriptions, although for occasional use the free subscription is sufficient. This tool is simply a convenient way to see where your students are at in their understanding of concepts. It may serve students better if there was a collaborative feature where students could make constructive comments on constructed responses and submit any questions or uncertainties they may have. Adding those features would make distance learning easier using this tool as well.
How I Use It
I would use this tool as a quick check for understanding and as a chance for students to practice and test themselves. This is a useful tool for individual responses, but is a bit complicated for group work. I would use this at the end of a lesson to check for basic understanding, and at the beginning of a class as a refresher of what we did the previous day. It can also be used as a quick pre-assessment to see how much students know about a topic before diving into the lesson. Using the tech tool is mostly a substitute for a traditional informal quiz, but the positive side of using this tool is that students can easily see other's responses, so they can gauge how their thinking compares to others.