Happy New Year and welcome back!
Just a quick reminder that on January 16th, we will have an Ed Tech Lunch to share ideas and tips on how to use Poll Everywhere. For more information and to register, please visit our Ed Tech lunch page.
This winter, Poll Everywhere (PE) is updating their comprehensive Course Management system to better synchronize student rosters with PE and also push points and participation grades from certain PE activities into the Moodle grade book. For those who use PE as a way to track participation or give students points for correct PE answers on multiple choice questions, this new feature will make that process easier.
This update will only have an effect if you integrate PE with Moodle. The PE Course Management system has been updated in three key ways:
First, faculty can evaluate student contributions based on both participation (did they attempt to answer a question) and correctness, with these metrics syncing directly to the Moodle grade book. The system displays both participation and correctness metrics in separate tabs, allowing for easy monitoring of student engagement and understanding.
Two important notes about tracking participation:
- Please do not solely rely on participation tracking through PE. A student may not have a personal device available to them and may share with a neighboring student. Therefore, that student may be present and participate without PE registering that student for that day.
- Tracking participation using Course Management is separate from PE’s Attendance Management feature. Course Management does not use geofencing.
Second, the organizational structure has been reimagined from the previous version of Course Management. Faculty can now create and manage multiple assignments, each containing various polling activities directly within Course Management.
Third, the grade synchronization process has been streamlined. Once activities are added to an assignment, faculty can sync grades with a single click, and the system automatically records the sync date and time for documentation purposes. This feature eliminates the need for manual grade entry and reduces the possibility of transcription errors.
The demo of this feature is now live. For anyone interested in trying Course Management and who has already connected PE to Moodle, you should now see the new Course Management option appear in a highlighted banner when you go to your individual course page in PE (see video below). During the demo phase, you can turn this feature on and off, and PE plans to fully enable Course Management during the summer of 2025.
If you have decided to turn on Course Management, you should now see the Course Management icon in the PE navigation bar (see figure 1)
If the Course Management icon hasn’t appeared yet on your account, you may be able to manually activate this feature (see figure 2).
If you have not integrated PE with Moodle, or wish to learn how to use Course Management now that you’ve activated it, there are a number of options for faculty to to choose from:
- Self-Guided by Poll Everywhere:
- Please first review how to integrate PE into your Moodle course. You will need to connect PE to Moodle before any of the Course Management features will work.
- Then follow PE’s Course Management guide: PE has a detailed Getting Started with Course Management page for more instructions.
- Ed Tech Lunch: Review our Ed Tech Lunches, and register for the January 16th Ed Tech Lunch on Poll Everywhere.
- Reach out to Don Vosburg (dvosburg) for any questions or to set up an appointment for one-on-one assistance.