Poll Everywhere is a tool that allows you to create live activities for students to complete during the lecture. Provide discussion points, pause points for reflection and quiz your students on their knowledge.
Access Poll Everywhere
Staff members that have an MWS account will have Presenter access on behalf of the University of Liverpool. Presenter access includes more permissions than a free Intro account, such as:
- Increased audience size
- Moderate incoming responses
- Create reports for responses
If you do not have an MWS account, or you can only access a free Intro account, please get in touch with the relevant administration team. If you have any problems logging into Poll Everywhere with your MWS account, then please contact University IT Services.
Available Activities
Examples of some activities you can create/use with Poll Everywhere:
Multiple choice
Ask a question and let participants choose from a list of answers.
Word cloud
Visualize audience responses as a dynamic word cloud.
Q&A
Participants respond to a question, then can upvote and downvote other answers. Great for gathering consensus.
Clickable image
Upload an image and ask a question. Participants click anywhere on the image to respond.
Open-ended
Ask a question and let participants type in a free-form answer.
Competition
Create a series of questions, then let participants compete to answer fastest.
Create and Edit an Activity
- Log in to Poll Everywhere using your MWS email address.
- Ensure that you have updated your default settings in the Activity settings area. E.g. participants may not change their answer once submitted. This will apply to all newly created activities. Existing activities must be updated manually - please see the 'Present an Activity on the Browser' section below for how to edit existing activities.
- Navigate back to the homepage using the 'Home' icon. Click the blue "+Activity" button in the left corner.
- Choose from the variety of activities. Please see the 'Links and Files' section below for advice on what activities are beneficial for teaching sessions and how to set these up.
- Enter your question in the top Title box. Then type in the answers depending on the chosen activity.
- Click "Create", or "Add another activity" to create another one straight away.
How can I create a bank of questions?
You can create a new folder for each teaching session to store a bank of questions. To create a folder, go to Activities and select +Folder. Retitle the folder to match the name of your session. When you create an activity, you can quickly save it to the relevant folder by selecting Assign activity to a folder.
Present an Activity on the Browser
Select the question you wish to start with. In the top right of the activity screen, press the 'Activate' button to ensure the activity is available for students to participate. Alternatively, entering full screen mode using the 'Present' button will activate an activity automatically.
At the bottom of the screen will be an activity bar
The function of the bar (from left to right) are as follows:
- The arrows will allow you to navigate through your activities
- The 'lock' icon will lock your current activity, so participants can no longer submit answers
- Selecting the 'Instructions' button will only show the question and potential answers (depending on the activity). The 'Responses' button will show the participants' responses to the question.
- 'Clear responses' will save all responses in the current run and 're-set' the activity ready for your next session. To view cleared responses, go to Poll Everywhere on the browser, select your activity and click 'Response history'.
Present an Activity in PowerPoint
Please see the Poll Everywhere plugin within PowerPoint for more details.
Moderation of Responses
View and approve free text responses before they go live on the screen, allowing you to monitor and exclude inappropriate answers.
Poll Everywhere - Student Perspective
Students can access your polls via a QR code or URL. They can only view active polls or pinned Q&A activities. Whilst students can login to Poll Everywhere, this is not required of them in order to participate in polls, therefore the majority of students will be anonymous, given guest IDs when interacting with a poll.