Poll Everywhere v. ActivExpressions

After our class where we used Poll Everywhere, I decided to do a comparison between Poll Everywhere and ActivExpressions. I'd seen people use Poll Everywhere in several presentations and the argument has been made in every single one, "why buy expensive clickers when you can use this free software?" It also seemed to have some positive attributes over my "clickers". After the first question of using Poll Everywhere, I told my students what we were doing. They helped me draw some conclusions.

Identifying Participants (Advantage: ActivExpressions)

The free version of Poll Everywhere does not allow identification of participants. For this reason, I only used yes/no or multiple choice for my experiment. ActivExpressions allows you to know who the participants are. I know who is sending the silly answers or texting in inappropriate answers. After you demonstrate you know who is messing around, the behavior stops. Working with teenagers and knowing what they text in when they know I know who is texting, I would be completely uncomfortable using anything but multiple choice or yes/no questions. You can purchase an upgraded package that costs $15/month if your school could not buy learner response systems so that you could identify your participants.

Ease of Use (Advantage: Poll Everywhere)

Having students use cell phones over the ActivExpressions does have some benefits. I didn't have to distribute the ActivExpressions or collect them. Students just got out their phones. Further, students are very familiar with their cell phones and how to use them. Once I explained to text to one number and then include another number in the body of the text, students easily answered the questions. There are always some issues with ActivExpressions. The most popular complaint is not predictive text.

Question Templates (Advantage: Poll Everywhere)

Poll everywhere has question templates you can use in Microsoft Word. AciveInspire has a template to type questions into, but there aren't any pretty backgrounds. You can download some question templates from Promethean Planet but they aren't very easy to use.

Feedback for Teacher (Advantage: ActivExpressions)

I like to use learner response systems to get feedback on the progress of individual students. Usually, I look at the list of participant answers and ask follow up questions to individual students based on their answers. Poll Everywhere didn't allow me to do this. I got the group response, but had no idea what individual students answered. If I paid for the upgrade, I could see what each participant was answering. Poll Everywhere does have some nice reports and slides they generate in Excel and Power Point. I can export data from ActivExpressions to Excel. We also found it would be really easy for students to not give their "real" answer if teachers don't know the full capabilities of the Poll Everywhere software. The default setting on a poll shows the results as they are sent in. Students who don't know the answer could easily see what others are answering and send in the same answer. Thus, teachers don't get feedback on what students actually know or think about a topic. Students enjoyed watching the answers show up on the graph, but admitted they would look at the results if they weren't sure of an answer. This is easily fixed by hiding the poll results but it did take a bit of experimentation to find the option.

Student Preference (Advantage: Mixed Results)

Many of my students enjoyed being allowed to use their cell phones in class. They also found using the cell phone much easier to use. Other students didn't really like using their own cell phones. They worried about using their own texts (even though most have unlimited) and were concerned they would get spam after texting the site. I even had a few kids who pretended not to have their cell phones because they didn't want to use them for school purposes. Another issue I would have to address if I used the cell phones more would be students being off task with their cell phones between polls. I noticed several students texting or playing games when we were trying to discuss a question.

Conclusion: Poll Everywhere has better templates, is quick to use, and many students enjoy using their own cell phones. However, if you stick with the free version it has several limitations. I will probably continue to use poll everywhere when I have limited time or when I don't need to have a lot of feedback.