If you missed last month’s Canvas Plus, we announced that Poll Everywhere is now enabled by default for all courses. The audience engagement tool that allows you to collect live feedback during classes, presentations, and meetings is ready for you when you are.
If you are not familiar with Poll Everywhere, it is an online polling system that can help you gain insights and conduct pulse checks using an expansive list of question types and activities. You can get live formative feedback on student understanding and engagement with content embedded right in the presentation or lecture materials. It includes eight different question types: Surveys, word clouds, Q&As, multiple choice questions, open-ended questions, ranking questions, clickable images, and competitions. As an instructor, you can use multiple-choice or open-ended questions for live quizzing, knowledge checks, and exit tickets. Poll Everywhere can also assist with guiding interactive debates and discussions, in-class competitions and leaderboards, and allows students to submit their own questions anonymously.
It can also be used outside of the classroom. Poll Everywhere can be used for meeting engagement, check-ins, and feedback. Doing a group session? Rankings, multiple-choice polls, word clouds, and open-ended responses can be conducive to moving from brainstorming to decision-making. In your next teambuilding or introduction, you can have attendees select where they’re from on a map using the clickable images activity type or submit anonymous input with participant-generated questions. It is all there for you to start using today.
If you need some help getting started, the Academic Technology Operations team is hosting an Enhance Student Engagement Using Poll Everywhere session on Friday, August 15, 2025, at 3 p.m. In the one-hour online workshop, you will see a demonstration of the multiple ways you can utilize Poll Everywhere in your course and how to create graded activities that directly integrate with the Canvas gradebook. Save your seat today at booking.smu.edu/event/14892807.
