Poll Everywhere is a robust, web-based polling application. UCI has a campus-wide license for Poll Everywhere so that any current campus affiliate (students, instructors, staff, etc.) can be a presenter (this is the role instructors would use) and/or participant (this is the role students will usually use). There is no cost to students! Poll Everywhere can be used both within and beyond the classroom, synchronously or asynchronously. Presenters can allow participants to respond to their polls via any web-enabled device (laptop, tablet, phone) or even via SMS (text message; note that neither the presenter nor participants’ phone numbers are shared).

Create or migrate account

To create a new Poll Everywhere presenter account, login with your UCInetID and password as follows:

1. Go to http://polleverywhere.com/
2. Select Login in the upper-right
3. Enter your UCI email address as it is listed in the campus directory and select Next
4. Login with your UCInetID and password; your account should automatically be created

Connect Canvas

Connect Poll Everywhere with Canvas course spaces in order to sync rosters and grades.

Note that Poll Everywhere works differently than other Canvas integrations: instead of adding the tool to the course navigation via the course space settings, Poll Everywhere is connected by adding an external tool link to a module.

Important: If there are multiple instructors, TAs, or other instructional staff who will need to be able to sync the roster and/or grades with Poll Everywhere, each person will need to link their own Poll Everywhere account with Canvas. Only one person needs to add the module and Poll Everywhere link in Canvas, but each person needs to take the remaining steps (step 4-6 below). Also, consider requesting a team so you can collaborate!

Sync Rosters

After connecting to Canvas (see above), syncing a Canvas course’s roster imports the list of enrolled students to the presenter’s participants list. Presenters can optionally restrict activity participation to people whose Poll Everywhere participant accounts are found on their eligible participants lists.

Sync Grades

After connecting to Canvas (see above), instructors can sync participation and/or correctness scores with the Canvas gradebook.

Optionally, add a link to your Canvas course space navigation so students can easily find their way to pollev.com (the login URL for participants) or even directly to your presenter URL (for example, https://pollev.com/ucirvine is the presenter URL for the clickers@uci.edu account; if you’re not sure what your presenter URL is, open your Poll Everywhere profile and you should see your URL and the option to change it at the top of the page).

To add this or any other links of your choice to a Canvas course space’s navigation:

1. Open your course space’s Settings page
2. Open the Apps tab
3. Search for the Redirect Tool
4. Press the app’s curved arrow icon
5. Press +Add App
6. Enter the URL to which you want to link (e.g. pollev.com or your personal presenter URL)
7. Check the box for Show in Course Navigation
8. Press Add App
9. Reload the page and you should see the new link at the end of your course space navigation; to reorder this or other elements of that navigation, open the Navigation tab in your course space settings

Suggested syllabus language

Include information in course syllabi to help students prepare to participate in Poll Everywhere activities. You can also import this content to a UCI Canvas course space from Canvas Commons here: https://lor.instructure.com/resources/a43deb156f1c49beb71d786ea5e4c627?shared

Note that the items in [orange bracketed text] should be edited depending on whether or not you are requiring location-based attendance checkins.

This class will be using Poll Everywhere. There are [two/three] things you need to do to make sure you will be able to participate successfully.
 
First, make sure your default email address in Canvas matches your email address as it is listed in the campus directory (https://directory.uci.edu/). This is required in order for Poll Everywhere to correctly report any grades or participation scores in the Canvas gradebook. Instructions for finding and updating your default email in Canvas are available here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Student-Guide/How-do-I-change-my-default-email-address-in-my-user-account-as-a/ta-p/410
 
Second, take a moment to sign in to Poll Everywhere with your UCInetID:

1. Open pollev.com
2. Select Login on the left side of the page
3. Enter your @uci.edu email address and press Next
4. Login with your UCInetID and password

 [Third, make sure that you have location services enabled on your device. Note that in some cases, you may be prompted more than once if, for instance, you need to turn location services on to begin with, then give the application you are using (whether that is the Poll Everywhere app or your web browser) permission to access that date and/or give that application permissions to share that data with pollev.com.

 

The steps to follow for that depend on your device. For instructions enabling location settings on some common devices, see:

 

• Mac devices: desktop/laptop, iPad, iPhone
• Windows desktop/laptop/tablet
• Android devices]

For more about completing Poll Everywhere activities, see https://support.polleverywhere.com/hc/en-us/articles/1260801556349-Responding-to-questions
 
If you run into any technical difficulty or have any questions about your UCI Poll Everywhere account, please contact our campus support staff by emailing clickers@uci.edu or call the Classroom Technologies help line at (949) 824-8833.

Note that if you are accepting responses via SMS and if you are requiring registration and/or assigning any credit based on responses (whether for correctness, participation, or a combination thereof) then students who will be using SMS must take a moment to certify their phone numbers so that their SMS responses can be correctly associated with their accounts.

If this applies to your class, we recommend including in your syllabus a link to the phone certification instructions here: Poll Everywhere – Certify your phone number

We also provide a PDF guide you can distribute by email, by adding a link on Canvas, or by printing and passing it out in class: Poll Everywhere tips for students

Create & run activities

Poll Everywhere provides detailed guides for creating and running activities.

Optionally, consider embedding your Poll Everywhere activities within PowerPoint, Google, or Keynote slides. If you embed activities in your slides, then the activities will automatically activate/deactivate as you reach the appropriate slides!

For PowerPoint slides, install the PowerPoint plugin on your own computer so you can configure your slides to include your activities. The plugin is already installed for use with PowerPoint on all general assignment classroom lectern PCs. If you are using the lectern PC in a campus classroom, be sure to take a moment to login to Poll Everywhere via PowerPoint before running slides with embedded activities:

1. Open your slides on the lectern PC
2. Press Poll Everywhere in the upper-right
3. Press Log In
4. Enter your UCI email address and press  Next
   
   
5. You should be prompted to login with your UCInetID and password and should then be able to run your PowerPoint slides with embedded activities

For Google slides, install the Chrome browser extension on your own computer and/or the lectern PC as-needed (while other software must be installed on lectern PCs by Classroom Technologies staff, browser extensions can be installed by any individual as-needed). Also note that if you sign in to a Google account and enable syncing, your browser extensions and related settings will actually be available to you anytime you sign into Chrome, on any computer. In other words, you can configure the Chrome extension on your own computer, enable Google account sync, and simply sign in to your Google account on the lectern PC and the extension should automatically be available.

Resources:

• PowerPoint plugin for Windows
• PowerPoint plugin for Mac
• Keynote plugin
• Google Chrome extension

Note: There is a cap of 7,000 responses per individual activity. If an activity is configured to let participants respond more than once, each response will count toward this limit. In other words, if 500 students respond to a single activity 14 times each, the activity would reach the maximum 7,000 responses and no further responses would be allowed. Should you need to run an activity that could receive more than 7,000 responses, please contact us ahead of time and we will work with Poll Everywhere to see if that limit can be temporarily increased for the appropriate activity.

Ad hoc polls (iClicker style)

Instructors accustomed to iClicker’s ad hoc polling can adapt Poll Everywhere to work similarly by creating a set of simple multiple choice activities with blank titles to use when needed as follows:

1. Create a multiple choice activity in Poll Everywhere with simple, placeholder text as the quest and options A, B, C, D, E etc. or similar as answer options.
2. Duplicate that activity until you have a handful of placeholder, ad hoc polls (for example, if you anticipate that you may run 5 ad hoc polls in a given class sessions, duplicate your placeholder activity until you have at least 6 copies) and edit each one to give them unique titles (for example, ‘Ad hoc poll 1, Ad hoc poll 2, Ad hoc poll 3, etc.)
3. When ready to poll students in class, either embed activities in your slides ahead of time, or manually activate one of your placeholder activities, make a note for yourself of which activity you used at that time (and if needed, what you asked / which option was the correct answer), then deactivate it when you’re done collecting responses from your students
4. For each subsequent poll in the same class session, repeat the above step with another of your placeholder activities
5. At some point after the class session and before you need to use your polls again, take a moment to clear the results of the activities you used that day and give that cleared data (which is not deleted, but set aside so that you can reuse your polls without including or losing prior responses) and set a title that will make sense to you later (for example, ‘Lecture 1, Monday 1/9/23’); for step-by-step instructions, see: https://support.polleverywhere.com/hc/en-us/articles/1260801551809-Clear-responses

   

6. If you need to send grades to Canvas using archived polling data, you can do so anytime! You can even edit an activity to assign one or more correct responses, then run a fresh gradebook report in order to automatically grade students’ responses based on their correct/incorrect responses.

If you’d like help with the above process, please contact us to set up a Zoom or in-person meeting to go over these steps and make sure you have what you need to run ad hoc polls in your classes!

Track attendance

If attendance tracking is the sole reason for potentially adopting Poll Everywhere, instructors might instead consider the Checkin @ UCI tool developed out of the ICS program instead. There’s no cost for that service either and it was specifically developed for attendance tracking with location verification.

For more information about Checkin @ UCI, see: https://checkin.ics.uci.edu/about

You can use students’ Poll Everywhere participation history as a proxy for attendance, which can be an added benefit alongside the opportunities for more active learning and engagement during class. There are two key requirements: the activities used for tracking attendance must be identified, not anonymous, and must not be competitions.

Poll Everywhere also has a location-based attendance check-in option, which allows instructors to configure specific locations from which students will be prompted to checkin before completing their activities. If a student cannot checkin successfully for whatever reason (they may not be in the right location or their device may not be configured to allow Poll Everywhere to access their location data), they can still participate without checking in and the results data will indicate they were not successfully checked in at the time.

Collaborate with co-instructors, TAs

You can share activities and results data with co-instructors, TAs, or other UCI Poll Everywhere presenter accounts through a team, which account admins can create on your behalf. Each team has a designated manager and that person can add and remove members as-needed.

Request a team

Accessibility

As with any teaching tool, it’s important to consider accessibility when designing and utilizing Poll Everywhere activities. There are two activities that may pose accessibility issues: clickable images (which are not accessible for students who are using screen readers or who otherwise cannot interact with images) and competitions (which have time limits by default, though this can be disabled). For details on Poll Everywhere accessibility standards, see: https://www.polleverywhere.com/accessibility

Resources

• Division of Teaching Excellence & Innovation: Teaching with Technology
• Poll Everywhere Training (requires login)

Participants (Students)

Create account

1. Open pollev.com
2. Select Login on the left side of the page
3. Enter your @uci.edu email address and press Next
4. Login with your UCInetID and password
5. Complete your account setup by adding your name

Complete activities

Poll Everywhere provides detailed guides for participating in activities.

Troubleshooting

Cannot login

The most common cause of a login issue is having a non-UCI email address displayed in the campus directory.

Poll Everywhere relies on your account having an @uci.edu email address in the campus directory. You are unable to login to Poll Everywhere through the campus single sign-on because your campus directory entry is currently set to list only your outlook.com address. Your email delivery point is also set to your outlook account and that’s completely fine; your delivery point is a separate setting that does not impact your ability to login to third party services using campus single sign-on.

To resolve this issue, please update your campus directory  settings as follows:

1. Login at https://phupdate.oit.uci.edu/phupdate
2. Under “Which email address would you like to publish in the directory?” please set that to your ucinetid@uci.edu address; this ensures that when you use single sign on to access a third party service, that service will be provided with the @uci.edu address to identify you

If you want your email delivered elsewhere, you can still set your delivery point to whatever account you prefer (set at http://www.oit.uci.edu/email-calendar/deliverypoint).

Cannot participate

There are several reasons a student may not be able to participate in a particular Poll Everywhere activity.

Not Registered

If you see “Pre-registration required” this means that your name and the email address on your Poll Everywhere account must be on the instructor’s list of eligible participants in order to complete that instructor’s activities.

Instructors create their eligible participants list by synchronizing Canvas rosters with Poll Everywhere. This process adds all the students listed on the roster in Canvas to the instructor’s list of registered participants in Poll Everywhere.

There are several reasons a student might not appear to be registered:

1. 1. They created a Poll Everywhere account manually (and likely using an email address that doesn’t match their information from the class roster on Canvas) rather than logging in with their UCInetID and password.
   2. They are not officially enrolled and listed on the course roster (meaning the roster sync would not include their information)
   3. The instructor may have last synced the roster before they were added to the class, in which case they should be added the next time the instructor re-syncs the roster (assuming they are enrolled)
   4. They’ve changed the default email address on their Canvas profile and it no longer matches their UCI directory information; if this is the case, make sure to change the default email in Canvas back so that it matches your directory-listed email. See: Instructure Community – How do I change my default email address in my user account?
   5. Occasionally, Poll Everywhere fails to redirect to the instructor’s page correctly and displays that message erroneously; try these steps:
      1. Clear the cache and cookies on your browser
      2. After clearing your cache and cookies, go to pollev.com
      3. Click on the “Log in” button on the screen (depending on the device, it may be to the left or bottom of the screen)
         
      4. Sign into your account
      5. After successfully signing in, enter your instructor’s username:
         

If you are still unable to participate in your activities, please contact us.

No Internet Access

Poll Everywhere is entirely web-based and that means you must have internet connectivity in order to participate. If you are using UCI wifi, make sure you have registered your device and you do not have private wifi address settings enabled. If you’ve been moving around between different locations on campus, it’s also possible your device may have hung onto a weak signal that is too far away for stable, reliable internet service. Some devices are pretty good at switching to a closer wifi access point, while others may not switch until they’ve been disconnected from the last access point to which they were connected. It’s a good general practice to turn wifi off and on again when you get to a classroom; that way, you’ll ensure your device connects to a nearby access point for the best available wifi signal.

See: Wifi setup and troubleshooting

Cannot checkin with location

Instructors may choose to enable a location tracking feature in Poll Everywhere that requires students to checkin, sharing their device’s geographic location with Poll Everywhere. If the device does not successfully provide the right location, you should still be able to participate by pressing ‘Continue without checkin,’ but your instructor may not give you credit (if applicable). You should be prompted to allow your device to share its location when you try to checkin.

Note that in some cases, you may be prompted more than once if, for instance, you need to turn location services on to begin with, then give the application you are using (whether that is the Poll Everywhere app or your web browser) permission to access that date and/or give that application permissions to share that data with pollev.com.

If you’re having trouble checking in, make sure that you have location services enabled on your device. The steps to follow for that depend on your device. For instructions enabling location settings on some common devices, see:

• Mac devices: desktop/laptop, iPad, iPhone
• Windows desktop/laptop/tablet
• Android devices

Another issue you may run into is that Poll Everywhere may report that your location does not match the location your instructor specified. This can happen if you are not in the physical classroom at the time you are trying to checkin, if your device is reporting the wrong location for some reason (for example, if you are using a VPN that masks your location data), or if your instructor’s location settings do not actually match the classroom’s location (in which case, I would expect all the student in the class to have the same issue).

If your location doesn’t appear correct to Poll Everywhere, then you should receive an error message that includes the latitude and longitude of the location your device reports.

If you continue to have difficulty with location services, please contact us for further assistance.

Embedded activities don’t work

There are several reasons why Poll Everywhere activities embedded in Powerpoint, Google, or Keynote slides may not work as expected.

Make sure one or both response options are enabled

Even if an activity is activated, no one can respond if neither the ‘Website’ nor the ‘Text messaging’ response options have been enabled. A hint that neither option is enabled is that the top of the slide, where participation instructions should appear, will instead be blank (click the thumbnail images below for examples).

Tip:  Adjust default activity settings under your account profile to make sure any future activities have one or more options enabled when those activities are created.

Make sure you’re logged in to Poll Everywhere if using Powerpoint on the lectern PC

The Poll Everywhere plugin for Powerpoint is already installed on all the lectern PCs, but you may need to take a moment to login if you haven’t done so recently in order to allow Poll Everywhere to run activities as you progress through your slides.

After you open your Powerpoint slides, open the ‘Poll Everywhere’ tab within Powerpoint and login using your UCI email.

See: Create & Run Activities above for instructions and a screenshot of the Powerpoint login interface.

Make sure you have the plugin configured if you’re using Google Chrome to present from Google Slides

See: Create & Run Activities above for Google Chrome plugin instructions

If you downloaded your slides, try resaving them to the desktop and adjusting the file properties

If you download your slides from somewhere you’ve placed it online (for example, a Canvas course space’s Files area or Google Drive), this can sometimes stop activities running due to Powerpoint security mechanisms.

Typically, that can be worked around as follows:

1. 1. Download the file to the lectern PC
   2. Open it in Powerpoint
   3. Saving a new copy to the desktop
   4. Close Powerpoint
   5. Locate the new copy saved to the desktop, right-click the file and open the file’s properties
   6. Check the Unlock box and press OK
      
   7. Open the slides and proceed normally in Powerpoint

Switch from extended screens to mirrored screens

If you’re using a laptop or other person device, are using Powerpoint’s presenter mode, and have your device’s screen set to extend (meaning, your device and the classroom’s screens are treated like two separate displays and you can move the cursor or application windows between them as opposed to mirror, where your screen and the classroom screen are identical), Poll Everywhere has an issue identifying the right place to show the participant view, which can result in the instructions and QR code being cut off or missing.

Try changing to mirrored display (the steps for this depend on your computer) to see if this resolves the issue. Note that even when mirroring, Powerpoint’s presenter view should still differentiate between the screens so that you can see your slides and notes in presenter view, while students should see only the slide content and your Poll Everywhere activities as appropriate.

Try forcing the monitor selection

In some cases, you may need to manually specify what display should be used for the presenter view and instructions for this are available here: https://support.polleverywhere.com/hc/en-us/articles/1260801546330-Force-Monitor-Selection

Try adjusting resolution

Very high resolutions can pose an issue with the classroom projection systems. Try changing your screen resolution to see if that resolves the issue; typically, a resolution under 2k maximum should work

If none of the above resolve issues with embedded activities, please contact us for additional assistance.