Poll Everywhere: Getting Started

Poll Everywhere is an audience response system licensed by GW's School of Medicine & Health Sciences.

Poll Everywhere provides SMHS faculty with multiple question types including multiple choice, word cloud, clickable image, and open-ended questions.  Functionality is also available for Q&A which allows users to respond and then upvote or downvote submitted responses, and competition which also the instructor to create a series of questions and let participants compete to answer fastest.

Poll Everywhere allows students to respond to questions synchronously via an app or webpage, and also permits asynchronous questions (Survey).

For support in learning how to use Poll Everywhere, please contact:

• Laura Abate  leabate@gwu.edu

Health sciences faculty can contact:

• Laurie Lyons   lbl@gwu.edu
• Linda Cotton    cottonl@gwu.edu

To get started with Poll Everywhere:

1. Sign up for a Poll Everywhere account.

• SMHS faculty can request a Poll Everywhere account from Tracy Thompson (tlthompson@gwu.edu) or Laura Abate (leabate@gwu.edu)

• When you receive the emailed invitation, click on the link and register for a Poll Everywhere account.

To use Poll Everywhere with Powerpoint, Keynote, Google Slides, Slack, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, or Zoom:

2.  Download and install the appropriate software extension on your computer.  

• Poll Everywhere for Google Slides is a Chrome extension and only works with the Google Chrome web browser.
• Available via the Software Center on SMHS computers

Poll Everywhere has four different types of polls available for use:

• Multiple-choice polls allow students to choose an answer from a list of responses options (e.g. True/False, A, B, or C).  You can also upload images to serve as response options.
• Word cloud displays audience responses as a dynamic word cloud. 
• Q&A allow students to submit responses; students can anonymously agree or disagree with other responses by upvoting or downvoting.
• Clickable image polls allow students to click on an image to vote (e.g. click on the state where you attended college). 
• Survey provides for asynchronous responses to Poll Everywhere questions.
• Open-ended polls allow student to submit free text responses to the polls.  Open-ended poll responses can be displayed as text wall, word cloud, cluster, or spotlight. Faculty may choose to use Moderation to manage which responses are shown publicly.
• Competition allows the instructor to create a series of questions, then let participants compete to answer fastest.