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 several interactive question types including multiple choice, word cloud, clickable image, and open-ended questions. Instructors can also employ Q&A, allowing users to submit questions, and Competition, in which participants compete to answer a series of questions the fastest.

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

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

• Robin Tse (rgwtse@gwu.edu)
• Teddy Hristov (teddy.hristov@gwu.edu) 

Health sciences faculty can contact:

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

To get started with Poll Everywhere:

SMHS faculty can request a Poll Everywhere account from Teddy Hristov (teddy.hristov@gwu.edu) or Tom Harrod (tph@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, Google Slides, WebEx, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Keynote or Slack:

Download and install the appropriate software extension on your computer.  

• Poll Everywhere for PowerPoint extension is also available via the Software Center on SMHS computers

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

1. 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.
2. Word cloud displays audience responses as a dynamic word cloud. 
3. Competition allows the instructor to create a series of questions, then let participants compete to answer fastest.
4. True or false allows you to quickly assess your audience's take on if a statement is true or false
5. 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.
6. Ranking activities allow options to be ordered into a desired rank which is submitted as one response.  
7. Clickable image polls allow students to click on an image/map to vote (e.g. click on the state where you attended college). 
8. Question & answer allow students to submit responses; students can anonymously agree or disagree with other responses by upvoting or downvoting.
9. Self-paced Survey provides for asynchronous responses to Poll Everywhere questions.
10. Numeric rating ​​​​​​​provides students the ability to rank their feedback on an issue on a scale of 1 to 5.