Instant Polls without Polling Technology

I'm going to share a useful trick with colleagues.

Many of you will have seen these instant polling systems where people in a room use little "remotes" to select answers or vote and the results come up on a big screen.

These systems are great and indeed NTU is about to purchase one. But what if you haven’t got access to such a system? Well something I’ve done for a few years is to use SurveyMonkey as an instant polling system. It is really (just) a well thought out, free, web based survey service. It is great for surveys and I would recommend it.

But if you are teaching in a classroom equipped with networked computers you can use it to gather instant feedback – and then use that feedback in your actual session

So yesterday I had a class where I showed video clips to students (and they could also access them independently via their PCs) and then got them to complete a short questionnaire on SurveyMonkey. I made the (very short) survey just before the class and emailed the URL to the students. A survey is really just a collection of questions so a short survey is simply a way of asking some questions and collecting the feedback. I then call up the feedback in class and we then discuss the results. It works well since the students get to have an individual and collective say; this gives me natural teaching material of relevance to the topic (since I author the survey) and the students (since they have just given anonymised answers).

Yesterday I asked students to give me feedback on the video clips (key part of the session and an excellent response rate) and later on I showed them a clip of the new iPhone and asked for some feedback on that (again using a pre-prepared SurveyMonky survey). Must do a video clip demo of this or write a short paper on this and other useful tricks… will add it to my job list!