Strategies for In-Class Polling in Synchronous Online Class Sessions
When most university teaching went online in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dan Levy very quickly saw ways to adopt in-person teaching techniques to engage students effectively on Zoom. He wrote a book about this that included very practical strategies for Zoom's built-in polling tool to engage and assess students in synchronous online settings, and he talks about some of those strategies on this podcast.
In my particular case, I happen to say, you know what, I’m going to stick to the Zoom native polling tool, because I think, for my purposes, it does pretty much what I would like. In the book I also described that within Zoom, you can do a little hack without using Zoom’s native polling tool to know not only the aggregate results, but to know which student voted for which option, which again, speaking of engagement, allows you to engage the students in a way that would be much harder to do because you can say, “Bonni, I noticed you said, B, can you tell us why.” Then, “Jimmy, I noticed you said C can you tell us why.” You generate a dialog that’s super easy to do because where each student stands.