Word clouds are a clever way to reinforce key points from your presentation.

They’re typically static images made up of multiple words about a single topic. The size of each word reflects its popularity or importance. Poll Everywhere builds on this idea with dynamic, interactive word cloud activities the audience can contribute to, live, during your presentation.

Create and present a word cloud poll, and the audience can respond using their phones and other web-enabled devices. Their responses appear automatically within the cloud, shrinking and growing with each new addition.

Below are six word cloud examples created with Poll Everywhere. You can use them to transform passive listeners into active participants during your next presentation.

 

Simple questions make great word cloud icebreakers

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One of the most popular uses of Poll Everywhere word clouds is breaking the ice before a presentation.

A simple icebreaker, such as the one above, lets the audience practice responding to a poll in a low-stress environment. This speeds up the time it takes to complete future polls because the audience already understands how Poll Everywhere works.

There are tons of example icebreaker questions you can ask. In general, a simple, opinionated question is all it takes to get people to respond. Keep this one light and easy.

Tip: If you’re unsure how your audience will respond, you can play it safe using moderation. This feature lets you automatically filter any profane language, or screen responses before they appear in your poll.

Word games are a fun break from the norm

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I recently blogged about several interactive presentation games you can play using Poll Everywhere.

Among these, word games are some of the fastest and easiest to create. One of my examples – Survey Says – is a fun way to get the audience all thinking on the same page.

Here’s how you play: create a word cloud and award a point to each person who submits the most popular response. This works best with simple, opinionated questions (such as the one above) because people are trying to guess the most popular response within their group.

This encourages empathy by asking colleagues to put themselves in each other’s mindset.

Summarize big topics into single words

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This is what word clouds do best: distill big topics into bite-sized ideas.

San Marino High School teacher Peter Paccone used word clouds as part of his weekly lesson plan covering the 2016 Presidential election. Above is a recreation of a word cloud Paccone had his students make after the election.

For presenters, having the audience summarize a topic this way can give you valuable insights into their mindset. It can also serve as a jumping-off point for a larger discussion.

Tip: Consider using Poll Everywhere’s anonymity option when discussing sensitive topics, or soliciting frank feedback. Anonymity encourages honesty, because every knows their identity is protected.

Identify gaps in the audience’s understanding

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A simple – but effective – live word cloud example comes from Nicole Smith, a teacher who uses Poll Everywhere to summarize what her students learned that week.

Asking people to condense a week’s worth of knowledge into a few words is no small feat. It forces them to switch gears mentally; from passively listening to actively forming a response.

This simple switch gives information a chance to settle within the brain, increasing the likelihood that it’ll be remembered days (or weeks) later.

Voting on a large number of items

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Poll Everywhere offers lots of ways for the audience to vote. Multiple choice polls are by far the most popular, but the Q&A activity is also lets people upvote individual responses to the top of the list.

However, if you’re asking the audience to vote on, say, 50 items or more, showing 50 bars stacked on one graph isn’t the most… elegant solution.

Let a word cloud handle the heavy lifting and communicate that feedback in a way that’s visually appealing. The size of the word indicates which one has the most entries (or, in this case, votes). If you need to see an exact count of how everyone voted, you can check the poll’s response history.

Tip: Use the total results counter in the bottom-left to know what all the votes are in.

Find common themes in feedback

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Most of my examples have asked the audience to summarize their feedback in a word. Now let’s flip the script and let them type as much as they want.

Word clouds are great at visualizing trends across a lot of text. Get a quick snapshot of popular opinion – and possibly identify gaps in understanding – by asking people to share their thoughts and feedback in as much detail as possible, using a one long response submission.

The word cloud will automatically show you the most common words people used, giving you a quick summary of popular opinion. To read the full text of their responses as sentences, either change the display to a text wall, or create a response report.