10 Tools for Gathering Real-time Feedback From Students

Chat tools and polling services provide good ways to hear from all of the students in a classroom. These kinds of tools, often referred to as backchannel tools, allow shy students to ask questions and share comments. For your more outspoken students who want to comment on everything, a feedback mechanism provides a good outlet […]
Creating and Conducting Polls in Google Slides and PowerPoint

Poll Everywhere is a polling tool that I’ve used off and on throughout the past decade. It’s a great tool for gathering questions from an audience, polling an audience, and seeing word clouds of sentiment from an audience. People can respond to your poll questions from their laptops, tablets, and phones. You can use Poll Everywhere […]
Mentimeter – Share Slides and Poll Your Class on One Screen

Mentimeter is an online polling and quiz tool that I’ve used since its launch over a decade ago. In that time it has evolved and added lots of helpful features for teachers. One of those features is the ability to broadcast your slides to your students’ computers, tablets, and phones. Doing that makes it easy […]
ClassPoint – Turn PowerPoint Into an Interactive Teaching Tool
Disclosure: ClassPoint is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com ClassPoint is a new-to-me PowerPoint tool that I’m excited to see used in online and in-person classroom and conference settings. At first glance you might think it’s just a poll and quiz tool. However, when you look a little deeper you’ll see that ClassPoint is more than just […]
Create Your Own Chatbot for Surveys and Quiz Practice

Acquainted is a free polling tool that has been around for a few years. It recently reappeared on my radar when a reader sent me a question asking for help creating a chatbot for her website. Acquainted is a conversational polling tool. What that means is that people who take your poll get an instant […]
How to Create and Conduct Polls in PowerPoint and Google Slides

A few weeks ago I published directions on how to create and conduct a poll in Google Slides. That video featured using the Poll Everywhere Chrome extension. People who prefer to use PowerPoint over Google Slides can also use Poll Everywhere in their slides. Poll Everywhere offers a free PowerPoint add-in that you can use […]
Three Ways to Conduct Polls in Google Slides

I have one group of freshmen this fall that is quiet and will rarely speak unless directly called upon. This is true of them when they’re in my classroom and when they’re on Zoom. So I call on them directly and I have them complete exit tickets in Flipgrid. Recently, I’ve started polling them at […]
Using Mood Clouds in Virtual and Hybrid Classrooms

Earlier this I published a video about creating and hosting polls in Google Slides with the Poll Everywhere Chrome extension. When I published that I mentioned that I use the word cloud option and have students respond to simple questions like “how do you feel after the long weekend?” and “what’s the best word to […]
Create and Conduct Polls in Google Slides

Poll Everywhere is a polling tool that I’ve used off and on throughout the past decade. It’s a great tool for gathering questions from an audience, polling an audience, and seeing word clouds of sentiment from an audience. People can respond to your poll questions from their laptops, tablets, and phones. You can use Poll […]
Slido for PowerPoint – Create and Run Polls Within Your Presentation
Slido for Google Slides was one of my favorite new tools in 2019. That’s why I’m excited that it’s now available for PowerPoint and Zoom too! As part of Slido for Education Slido now lets you create polls and run polls within Google Slides, PowerPoint, and Zoom presentations. Slido is hosting a free webinar next […]
GoSoapBox – Quickly Poll Your Class

GoSoapBox is a student response system that I’ve used off and on over the years. It offers a few ways to conduct online polls for your students to respond to on their phones, tablets, or laptops. My favorite polling option in GoSoapBox is called the Confusion Meter. The Confusion Meter is a simple poll that […]
Two Neat Polling Tools That I Recently Recommended

I get a lot of questions from readers. I try to answer all of them. Those that I think have a broad appeal I turn into blog posts and or include in my podcast. Earlier this week I received a question from a reader who was looking for suggestions for polling tools that her students […]
How to Create and Run Polls in Google Slides

Slido is a polling service that recently released a free Google Slides add-on and companion Chrome extension. The combination of the two tools makes it easy for anyone who uses Google Slides to quickly create and launch polls directly within the Google Slides editor. The thing that I like about Slido is that you can […]
Slido – Create and Run Polls Within Your Google Slides

Slido is a polling tool that has recently launched a Google Slides add-on and a corresponding Chrome extension. With Slido installed you can create polls directly in the Google Slides editor. The poll will appear as a slide in your presentation. The poll slide includes your question and the directions for your audience to respond […]
Plickers Brings Back Individual Student Reports!
Back in September the folks at Plickers, a popular student-response service, released a bunch of updates to their mobile apps and website. Some of those updates, like easier display of questions have been popular. Some of those updates were panned by teachers. Fortunately, the Plickers team has been responsive to the voices of their users […]
ClassPulse – Gather Feedback from Students

ClassPulse is a new entry into the crowded market of polling and messaging apps for schools. I learned about the app through Audrey Watters’ weekly round-up of education news and then I gave the app a try on my Android phone. Audrey described the ClassPulse as “another classroom feedback tool” and that’s exactly what it […]
7 Good Tools for Surveying Your Audience
Games like those you can make on Kahoot and Socrative are great for review activities. However, you don’t always need to play a full game to gauge your students’ understanding of a topic. And other times you just need a quick way to anonymously survey your class. Here are some tools that you can use […]
Swift – Poll Your Audience Via SMS or Web

Swift is a new polling service that lets you collect responses through text messages or through a simple webpage. The free version of the service allows you to collect responses from up to 50 people per poll. That limit is adequate for most classroom settings. To get started on Swift you need to create an […]
How to Create a Conversational Poll

Acquainted is a neat polling service that I wrote about earlier this week. I described it as a conversational polling service because you can program responses to appear based on the response choices someone make on your poll. That description might have confused some folks as I have received a bunch of questions about how […]
Acquainted – Conversational Polling

Acquainted is a free tool for conducting online polls. Unlike other online polling tools, Acquainted is a conversational polling tool. What that means is that people who take your poll can get an instant response from your regarding their selections of poll options. Your responses are written into Acquainted and programmed to appear to poll […]
Three Options for Adding Q&A to Your Slide Presentations
Building questions into your slides is a great way to get your audience to think about your message and to interact with your message. You can do this by putting a question on your slide and then directing people to a TodaysMeet room or another similar chat service. The problem with that method is that […]
Mentimeter Adds Options for Image-based Polling
Mentimeter is a convenient service that lets you create and distribute poll questions for an audience to answer during a presentation. Your audience can respond to your questions on their phones, tablets, or laptops. Earlier this year Mentimeter added a quiz option to their services. That option works much like Kahoot or Socrative. This week […]
Mentimeter Adds a Quiz Option to Their Polling Service

Mentimeter is a nice service that 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. I reviewed the service a few years ago. Since then Mentimeter has added some more options for teachers. The latest option added to Mentimeter is […]
New Polling Feature Added to Google Classroom

Google Classroom has offered options for asking questions for quite a while. Today, Google released a new way to ask questions. You can now post multiple choice poll questions in your Google Classroom classrooms. To post a poll in Google Classroom simply select the “add question” option in the lower-right corner of your Classroom screen, […]
How to Create a Video-based Poll

ClipChoose is a free polling tool that I featured in a blog post last month. On ClipChoose you can create a poll that is based on a comparison of two or more videos. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create a video-based poll on ClipChoose. Applications for Education ClipChoose could be a […]
Create Video-based Polls on ClipChoose

There is not a shortage of online polling tools to use in your classroom. Most of those polling services are simply text-based or text and images. Clip Choose is different because your polls are based on videos. To create a Clip Choose poll you enter the URLs of up to eight YouTube videos. After entering […]