Set course goals for your class and have a plan for how any of these audience response tools can help you with those goals. Ask, “What can audience response do for me?” rather than “What can I do with Poll Everywhere or flash cards?"
If you are new to using audience response tools, pick a few things to try and focus on doing them well.
Practice using the materials, software or equipment before you are in front of a class, so that students are not afraid that there will be problems. You want to spend class time teaching, not troubleshooting.
Make sure your students understand why you are using this tool in the class.
Go over rules and expectations. What sort of credit are you giving for Poll Everywhere questions? What will you do when a student misses class or forgets their device or their flash card? What will the penalty be for entering responses for another student? Consider dropping some of the lowest Poll Everywhere scores to allow room for illnesses and other reasons for absence.
Use the tool routinely and consistently, so that students will see audience response questions as another part of the class, not optional or experimental or just for attendance.
Practice, observe and share with other faculty, especially more experienced users of your tool.
Be sure you and your students are very comfortable with the tool and that you have addressed any accessibility issues before doing graded activities. Consider keeping your audience response questions low stakes and frequent, rather than high stakes and infrequent.
Poll Everywhere presenter notes and best practices
Please also see Teaching and Learning Initiatives’ guide for using audience response systems in class.
