7 Good Tools for Surveying Your Audience

Games like those you can make on Kahoot and Socrative are great for review activities. However, you don't always need to play a full game to gauge your students' understanding of a topic. And other times you just need a quick way to anonymously survey your class. Here are some tools that you can use to poll your students or any other audience.

PingPong is a free online polling system that lets you collect feedback in the form of multiple choice, text, or image-based responses. In the short video embedded below I demonstrate the teacher and student views of the free PingPong response system.



Acquainted is a free tool for conducting online polls. Unlike other online polling tools, Acquainted is a conversational polling tool. What that means is that people who take your poll can get an instant response from your regarding their selections of poll options. Your responses are written into Acquainted and programmed to appear to poll respondents as they make answer choices.


Swift is a polling service that lets you collect responses through text messages or through a simple webpage. The free version of the service allows you to collect responses from up to 50 people per poll. That limit is adequate for most classroom settings. Swift could be a good little service to use to gather anonymous feedback from your students. The option to use text messaging, web responses, or both makes Swift a versatile tool for schools. The option to send students to a new page after submitting a text response could help you keep your students on task. The option to instantly show poll results could be helpful in starting discussions in your classroom.

Poll Everywhere is the standard in this market. It has been around for a long time and doesn't show signs of fading. It's a service that allows you to collect responses from an audience via text messaging. The free plan for K-12 educators provides selection of features and quantity of responses that is adequate for almost any classroom. One of the neat ways to display feedback gathered through Poll Everywhere is in word clouds. The word cloud feature integrates with Wordle, Tagxedo, and Tagul.

Add Poll Questions to Your Slides

The Q&A feature in Google Slides lets your audience submit questions to you. They can view all of the questions submitted and vote for the ones they want you to answer. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how this feature works.



Mentimeter lets you add questions to your slides. You can create slides in Mentimeter or import slides from your desktop. You can create poll questions that your audience responds to in a multiple choice format or they can respond by using emojis. Like a lot of audience polling tools, your audience responds to your questions by going to a specific URL then entering a code to access your questions.

Microsoft Office users can take advantage of the OfficeMix plug-in for PowerPoint to add quizzes and polls into their slides. Watch the tutorial below to learn how to use the features of OfficeMix.

ReClipped - Take Notes and Share Notes on Educational Videos

ReClipped is a neat tool that lets you take notes, share notes, and share clips from educational videos. ReClipped blends the best aspects of TurboNote, VideoNot.es, and Pinterest into one slick system.

With a ReClipped account you can clip sections of videos that you find on YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Coursera, and TED. In addition to clipping you can create time-stamped notes about the videos that you clip. The Pinterest-like aspect of ReClipped appears if you choose to share your clips and notes on a board. ReClipped boards can be shared publicly or kept private.


Applications for Education
ReClipped has the potential to be a good place for high school and college students to discover and share notes about educational videos. Because of the public search for ReClipped boards I would be cautious about letting middle school students use it.

Black Friday Sale on 5 Practical Ed Tech Webinars

Throughout the year I host professional development webinars and courses on Practical Ed Tech. Usually, the webinars are $20 each. But for the next five days you can get five of my most popular webinars in one bundle for just $25. Click here to take advantage of this offer.

The 5 webinars in the Black Friday bundle are:

• Search Strategies Students Need to Know
• Google Forms & Sheets for Beginners
• Fun With Formative Assessments
• How to Create a Great Classroom Blog
• Keeping Track With Google Keep, Calendar, & Classroom

Individually these webinars are $20. Purchase the Black Friday bundle and you'll get all five for $25. 

Click here to get five PD webinars for $25!

Three Thanksgiving Activities You Can Do Today!

It's Thanksgiving Eve here in the U.S. If you have school today and you're still looking for some Thanksgiving-themed activities to do today, I have three suggestions for you.

1. Build a thankfulness Padlet wall with your students. 
Create a Padlet wall and have students share text and picture notes in which they share the things that they are thankful for this year. If you're not familiar with Padlet, I have some tutorial videos here.

2. Create a Thanksgiving traditions Flipgrid. 
Flipgrid makes it easy to have students record and share quick video responses to a teacher's prompts. Create a Flipgrid and ask your students to share their favorite Thanksgiving traditions. If you have time, consider posting your Flipgrid on Twitter and asking other teachers to have their students respond too.

3. Contribute to The Great Thanksgiving Listen 2017.
StoryCorps is once again hosting The Great Thanksgiving Listen. This is an initiative designed to get people to talk with family members and record stories about Thanksgiving. Learn more here.

Intro to U.S. Involvement in WWI - And What Kids Say About Tom Richey's Videos

Tom Richey recently released a new video for students in U.S. history courses. The United States in World War I is a video in which Tom provides students with an overview of why the United States got involved in the war, why U.S. involvement was significant, and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. It's hard to provide depth in a ten minute, but Tom does a great job of providing students with an overview of U.S. involvement in WWI. Watch the video as embedded below.


Tom has more than 87,000 followers on YouTube. Most of them are students. Here are some recent comments from students:

"I already passed AP US History last year, but I still watch your videos."

"I love your videos, always helping me out before a quiz!"

"Thank you! I have a APUSH DBQ tomorrow and this video definitely helped me get an idea of what a good dbq should be."

"I’m not even in AP EURO anymore but I love these videos so much!"

How does Tom make videos that get comments like these? Find out next week in How To Teach With Video.