Poll Everywhere Introduces Voting on Images

Earlier this week the popular survey service Poll Everywhere released a very nice update, support for images and equations. Now you can put images into your polls and have students vote on the images. Another part of this update is the option to include mathematics equations in polls. The video below provides an overview of the updates.

Image Support for Multiple Choice Options from Poll Everwhere on Vimeo.


Applications for Education
The image voting option could be a good way to create surveys or polls in which you ask students to identify plants, animals, and other objects. The mathematics inclusion option will allow you to create multiple choice polls in which students have to select the correct equation.

Urtak - Find Out What Your Audience is Thinking

Urtak is a free and simple polling service that can be used on any blog or website. The polls you create can have multiple questions, but they must be "yes or no" questions. But Urtak isn't that limited because visitors to your poll also have the option of writing in their own questions. Try it out for yourself in the poll I've embedded below.

Practice Poll

You can get started using Urtak in seconds by registering with your Twitter or Facebook account. You can also use your email address to create an account with Urtak. As you can see above, Urtak polls can be embedded into your blog or you can direct people to your poll by sharing the unique url Urtak assigns to your poll.

Learn more about Urtak in this Building 43 video in which Robert Scoble interviews Urtak's CEO.


Applications for Education
Urtak could be a useful tool for quickly collecting informal feedback from students. I like to run polls on my course blog about a week before a test. I use these polls to gauge how my students are feeling about the course content and what we may need to spend more time studying.

Buzz Dash Dashes Out of Business - Get Your Data

I just received an email from Buzz Dash, a polling service that has been mentioned a couple of times on Free Technology for Teachers, informing me that they are shutting down their services effective tomorrow. It's very short notice, but at least they sent out a notice. If you have a poll running through Buzz Dash, you're going to have to find another solution. Most blogging platforms have some type of polling widget available for easy integration into your blog. You might also want to investigate the eight other options available here.