Poll Everywhere - audience response for lectures

I've not blogged on e-learning stuff for a while so time for a new one. Today I'm speaking at the University of Sheffield's annual Learning and Teaching conference. My talk is all about integrating 'low-tech' technology into teaching - the slides are online too. One thing I'm doing is demonstrating Poll Everywhere for audience response in lectures (screenshot of home page below).


It can often be very useful to get feedback from students during or at the end of teaching sessions. Since the vast majority of students now have mobile phone deals with unlimited texts or can get online via their phones, Poll Everywhere is making a real impact in this area. It's very easy to use and it is free for classes of up to 32 students. An example below of how you can also embed the polls in web pages... If you click an option below you can see the results of this crucial poll!

Replace your audience response systems with Poll Everywhere

Many universities in the UK (e.g. Brighton, Greenwich) are now using Poll Everywhere, so it may be here to stay. I think it is a very effective tool for quick feedback from students.

Field of dreams e-learning

In the film Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner's character hears a voice saying 'if you build it, he will come'; 'it' being a baseball field and 'he' being the great baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson. Okay, so I haven't been hearing voices and I'm not expecting any sports legends to use my e-learning resources, but I did built it (a screencast site inside the University's VLE) and he/they (users) did come - some of them are even spending hours looking at the content, which so far is not complete but there's probably around 4 hours content on there.

Anyway, the point being I had an idea I felt pretty sure was a good one and now people are coming. The unfortunate part is that I'm moving jobs so won't be able to continue it at Manchester, but will probably do something similar at Sheffield after I arrive. All posts have to have an image:



So, any e-learning boffins out there - building a dedicated screencast site is not that much work, it is very effective within existing VLE technology and students will use it. So far I've got about 160 users but this number should rise once the semester goes on. That's it for now.