Our most colorful activity just got a new coat of paint
Word cloud is an audience favorite among Poll Everywhere activities.
Seeing words pop, fade, and fly across the screen draws so many “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience it’s like having a little fireworks display right on stage. Together, these words tell a story.
Two new upgrades help deliver that story faster than before. You can now combine words in a word cloud, and present words using a custom gradient color palette. Together, these changes create more colorful, customizable word clouds that are sure to impress the audience.
Combine multiple words in a single word cloud response
Use an underscore or tilde between words to submit them as a single word cloud response
You can now add an underscore (“_”) or tilde (“~”) to combine two or more words in a word cloud response. That means submitting “Peanut_Butter” will appear as “Peanut Butter” (without the underscore) in the word cloud. “Peanut” and “Butter” will not be separated into different words, but instead appear as a single, combined phrase.
Set a custom gradient color palette for word cloud responses
Customize the look of all words in your word cloud to match your presentation’s theme
Product manager Brian Goodman explained the thinking behind the changes. “We used to display word cloud responses in a set of 20 colors. Poll Everywhere would randomly select one of those 20 colors for each word in the word cloud. And you couldn’t customize them. If you had a background that was similar to one of those 20 colors, some words were tough to read.”
To improve readability – and creative potential – of word clouds, Poll Everywhere has two new colorful options for presenters to use.
Set custom gradient: You can now set two colors for your word cloud responses. The most popular responses appear with the first color, the least popular appear with the second, and everything else appears with a color in the spectrum between those two. This option is located under message item in the visual settings menu.
Automatic contrasting: If you change the background of your word cloud, but not the color of the responses, Poll Everywhere will automatically adjust the response color to help them stand out against your new background.
How will you use these new upgrades in your presentations? Get inspired with 10 word cloud activities for the classroom and 6 word cloud examples created with a live audience. Share you word cloud creations on Twitter, and be sure to tag @PollEverywhere so we can see what you created.
Happy polling!
