We love building Poll Everywhere for educators to help them more effectively reach their pupils. Eric Tremblay just discovered Poll Everywhere and hit the nail on the head with what we’re trying to do for classroom response systems: make them accessible to all educators and move beyond today’s expensive and constrained hardware systems. This is what Eric thought after using Poll Everywhere for the first time:

• It’s fast. When I send a txt msg it takes about 2-3 seconds for the vote to be captured in the resulting graph
• It’s easy for students to participate. As easy as sending a conventional text message and they do not have to buy a ‘clicker’ they can use their personal cell phone.
• It’s easy for instructors. No longer must the presentation room be equipped with a receiver to capture the signal from the clickers. All you need is an internet connection to capture the data from the live graph.
• You can embed the ‘live’ graph as a PowerPoint slide into your classroom presentation. No need to minimize PowerPoint to go to a website to view the results.
• It’s cheap! In fact, you can try it for free with a maximum of 30 votes per question. For larger numbers of votes you can subscribe to the system for a monthly fee.
• Web-voting is enabled. If you have students without a cellphone but with a laptop… then they can still vote by going to a specific link the instructor provides.Read more on Eric’s Blog…

Its a huge design and technical challenge trying to build such a great tool for teachers. Marketing a product like Poll Everywhere isn’t easy so we’re always thrilled when we hear from people that get it. Thanks for the great write-up Eric and we’ll be following you to see how Poll Everywhere works in your classroom!