My Vote Goes To…
Reused courtesy of Touring Club Suisse/Schweiz/Svizzero TCS Flickr photostream under a CC licence
Since the demise of the twitter-based voting tool in PowerPoint, we have been on the lookout for alternative web-based voting tools with similar functionality. My colleague has already mentioned one alternative, Socrative in an earlier post and a recent discussion on the ALT mailing list has thrown up a couple of other contenders, which I took a look at, namely:
Poll Everywhere which allows for 40 responses per poll if you create a free account. It’s very simple to set up and use and allows for voting via text, twitter, or by accessing your unique Poll Everywhere page. The great thing about Poll Everywhere is that it integrates easily with PowerPoint. You need to download a piece of software for the integration, but once it is installed it works in a similar fashion to the TurningPoint integration with PowerPoint. Voting updates are instantaneous. But, unfortunately, you are not able to export results or access reports using the free account. Nevertheless, it still gets my vote.
Mentimeter is a bit more generous in that the free account allows unlimited responses and unlimited question creation (as long as they are independent questions and not in a ‘series’ ie linked to previous questions). Votes can be cast by visiting the Mentimeter voting webpage and entering a “Voters ID” which you can get once your question is created. Unlike Poll Everywhere you cannot text or tweet to vote. However, Mentimeter does also have PowerPoint integration via a third party tool called LiveWeb. However, it is not as straightforward as the Poll Everywhere integration. You must go through a fiddly installation process and then manually set up a slide to share each question you wish to share as a webpage. Step-by-step instructions on how to do this can be found on the Mentimeter website.
Finally, there is one other tool to throw into the mix which is LectureTools (recently acquired by Echo 360 (our ReVIEW System)). I’ll probably post about LectureTools separately once I’ve had a chance to have a more serious look at it.