Speaker 1: Hello, this is Tony Burke here with a short screencast demonstrating how to use an online polling system called Poll Everywhere. This can be a fun way of engaging students in class or it's also a useful way of gauging whether or not students have actually grasped the key messages that you want to get across during your class. Now lots of colleagues will be familiar with the emergence over the last 10 years or so of in-class response systems which typically make use of these handheld devices known as clickers. So what would normally happen is that the lecturer would display a question on the screen and ask students to respond by clicking one of the options on the handheld device and as their responses come in they're displayed live on the screen. So it's a little bit like Ask the Audience in Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Now as great as these devices are, they're a fun way as I say of getting students involved in the class, there's a couple of significant disadvantages to using them. Firstly as the lecturer it's going to be your responsibility to arrange for them to be in the classroom that you're using at the time that you want. And secondly of course it's going to be up to you to distribute these devices at the beginning of the class and actually collect them all in at the end. Now I don't know about you but those disadvantages have been enough to put me off using them and I must confess that I've never actually used these in-class clickers at all in my teaching. Fortunately there is an alternative which doesn't require any specialist equipment because it makes use of devices which students bring normally to the class anyway, whether that be their phones or laptops or tablets. It's an online system as I say called Poll Everywhere and it's available at this website and I'm going to demonstrate now how to use it. I'm just going to pause the recording here while I go into the live website. Okay so here we are in the live website and you can see that there's a red button there in the middle of the screen which says Create Your First Poll and it is possible to just set up a poll immediately without even registering but to get the sort of full advantage of the various facilities that are available on the service it probably is best to register. So you can see that I've actually already got an account and you can see a message there at the bottom of the screen which tells us that this free account is limited to 40 responses per poll. So the basic account does have some limitations. You can't really use it with class sizes above 40. However the University of Westminster does have a licence for the unlimited version of this package and if you want to make use of it with a larger class and I know lots of colleagues will be using something like this with much larger classes than 40 then all you have to do is log a Fix It ticket and book the use of the University's licence for the slot that you want. So here's my page, the registration page for my personal account and you can see that I've used lots of different polls over the last few months. But if you want to create a poll then you just click on that red button in the top left hand corner and it asks you to enter a question. So let's just put in something simple. How often do you think you will make use of Poll Everywhere? Ok so it gives us a number of options here. We can either have an open ended question where the audience can enter free text and they can put in anything they like. You can make it a multiple choice answers or with certain types of questions you can actually upload an image and the respondents can actually click somewhere on the image. In this instance I'm going to make it a multiple choice which is perhaps the most common typical use during a lecture situation. So let's give a number of different options. So we could say frequently, we could say occasionally or we could add a third option and say not at all. Ok and then we just click create. So hopefully now our poll will have been created and it takes us to the screen on which our poll appears. So we could actually now just display this in the lecture so the students will actually be looking at this screen and you can see that there's a number of different ways in which they can respond to the question. If they're going to use their mobile phone then they simply go on to, they text in this case Tony Burke 628 to this number. So what they would see is something like this. They would use their phone, they would text the Tony Burke 628 in this instance but obviously everyone else will have a different message and then they'll get a response back saying they've joined my session and then all they have to do is click on one of the responses to respond to the poll. So let's just go back into the poll there. Another way is that they can just go on to a website on a device whether it's a laptop or a smartphone or a tablet. If they go to that address they will see the options and they just click on one to join. So all we have to do now is actually launch the poll. So we do that by making the poll active by clicking on this button here and there you can see the different codes that they have to text to the different responses. So for example I've now got the poll on my phone. So if I text A to that response then hopefully on the screen, there we go, you can see the A comes up. I've also got it currently on my tablet so if I click the second option on the tablet then again it comes up. So you can imagine that if you're using this in a class with a whole group of students the more responses that come in you instantly see it live on the screen and so it's quite a fun way of students actually seeing it. They do seem to quite enjoy using it because it's just very sort of lively and engaging and it is a good way of monitoring whether students are actually engaging with it because you can see how many people are actually responding to it. So that's about it really. If we go back to my polls you can see that I've used it in a number of different ways. I'll just show you a couple of other examples but here is a poll I did in a module, a Level 4 module where it's really about construction technology. So it's a typical sort of multiple choice question but it's a good way of assessing whether students have engaged properly with the content. I also used it quite widely in a Level 5 module that I do which is about the statutory control of building works where I wanted students to distinguish between issues that were covered by planning permission and issues that were covered by building control. So I gave a whole range of different questions and each time I just asked students to identify whether or not they thought the issue was a planning issue or a building control issue. So again you can see the sorts of responses I was getting but it was quite a nice way of getting students involved with very little set up and very little hassle. So that's about it really. As I say I hope that it's something that other colleagues might find useful. So thanks for listening.