What is it? 

Student response systems (SRSs) enable instructors primarily to ask questions of their audience, assign various activity types, and collect and track immediate or asynchronous/self-paced responses. In addition, responses may be anonymous to provide a safer space to answer questions, which may help more with controversial questions. Various SRSs can have few or many features, ranging from only multiple and true/false questions to an entire slide presentation suite offering interactive slides, open-ended questions, and word clouds.

Why is this useful?

Engaging a larger group of students in an argument, asking them all to form an opinion or provide ideas about solutions can be a daunting task.  Student response systems can help faculty gauge how many students have grasped a concept both in real-time understanding as well as comprehension of previous assignments, engage students with controversial topics without shaming individuals, or help uncover misconceptions and start the process of unlearning.

Additionally, student response systems have been shown to increase engagement and attention, promote active learning, and support a more inclusive classroom experience (Hill & Fielden, 2017; Walklet, et al., 2016). Furthermore, if you wish to track your student responses over time, you can generate reports on how well students have responded to your questions.

How do I use it at Carleton?

Carleton Academic Technology supports two versions of student response systems:

1. Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere (PollEv) is a web-based Student Response System, which will work on many devices, and provides a variety of polling options. PollEv also integrates into a number of applications, allowing you to remain in your presentation (ex. Google Slides, or PowerPoint), or communication software (ex. Slack, Zoom). Additionally, certain features can be integrated into Moodle, including adopting your course roster, and transferring points earned on questions in PollEv into your Moodle gradebook.

We do have a limited number of presenter accounts, so you will need to request to join our enterprise account and wait for approval. In order to create your Poll Everywhere account with Carleton to access premium features, please follow these steps:

  1. Go to Poll Everywhere, and click on ‘Log In‘.
  2. When prompted to enter your username or email address, enter your Carleton email address, and click on ‘Next‘.
    • *If prompted to choose between presenter or participant anywhere in this process, select “I’m a presenter”
  3. The ‘Next’ button will change to ‘Log in with Carleton College‘, and once you click on ‘Log in with Carleton College’, you will be brought to Carleton’s Single Sign On to enter your Carleton credentials. Next, you can request to join the Enterprise account.
  4. Click the “Request to join” button when redirected back to Poll Everywhere.
  5. On the Join the account screen, enter any missing information from the form if needed, and click “Send request.”

You request will be on its way and an administrator here at Carleton will be able to approve it. Please allow some time for your request to be approved. Once approved, you will be able to login it at Poll Everywhere with your Carleton credentials and you will be passed on directly to your account.

For more information on Poll Everywhere and its features, please read the ITS blog post on Poll Everywhere, visit our Knowledgebase article for links to Poll Everywhere help, or reach out to Don Vosburg for consultation (dvosburg).

Yearly audits will take place during the summer, or earlier if needed, in order for us to stay at or within our total Poll Everywhere licenses. Licenses that have not been active for an extended period of time will be converted to a personal account, in which you will retain all of your activities, but enterprise-level premium features will no longer be available. If you find you have been removed from our Carleton enterprise account and now want to use Poll Everywhere again, please follow the above steps to request to join our account.

2. Google Meet Polling

Google Meet has a built in polling feature. Polls can be created in draft form beforehand and published during the meeting. To learn more about polling in Google Meet, visit Google’s support page for polling in Meet.

3. Zoom Polling

Zoom Polling is a built-in feature in Zoom. To learn more about polling in Zoom, visit Zoom’s support page for polling. Visit the Zoom page for examples of Zoom Polling, found in the Zoom Teaching Tips link.

In addition, faculty can also find free add-ons to Google Slides, use Google Forms for feedback, or use a Moodle Survey for asynchronous collection of information. Free limited versions of Mentimeter, or slido, may also be useful for certain learning situations.

CARE Strategies

Need a quick example or description of how one of our tools can be viewed through CARE?

Not sure what CARE is? Please see this blog post on CARE for more information.

Community: Community building in PE can be done by gathering feedback from your students on a regular basis, and applying that feedback in our course. You can also do check-ins with your students using the emotional scale, or have them approve of and/or answer questions and comments using the Q&A activity.

Agency: PE opens up opportunities for people to answer in a variety of ways. Give your audience a choice in how they answer by typing into PE, or providing a verbal answer in the classroom.

Representation: Select representative images and choose the wording of your questions in order to avoid implicit, negative stereotype clues. Or, by using the anonymous feature in PE, students may feel more comfortable in answering questions or making comments without the fear of their answers, or themselves, being stereotyped by their identity. 

Equal Access: Providing a question in PE creates an opportunity for at least 4 ways to make your question more accessible. There is the 1) written text of the question, 2) helpful images can be added with alt text available, 3) PE is screen reader accessible, and 4) you can also read aloud the question in class.

Poll Everywhere Skillshop information

Link to slides for Poll Everywhere: Getting Started (2023)

Resources

Hil, D., & Fielden, K. (2017). Using Mentimeter to Promote Student Engagement and Inclusion. Pedagogy in Practice Seminar. 18 December, 2017, (unpublished), http://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/3473/

Walklet, E., Davis, S., Farrelly, D., & Muse, K. (2016); The impact of Student Response Systems on the learning experience of undergraduate psychology students. Psychology Teaching Review (v22) No. 1, Spring 2016.