Instant Polls for Student Engagement

Divyansh Bordia -

Experts suggest that learning is more effective when it is an active process rather than a passive one. Online classes and online education have become an integral part of our lives now. It is important to engage students in the classroom and make classes interactive.

Our brains have a sieve or a filter and whenever it is exposed to new information, it tends to categorize into two; information that is trivial and information that has to be retained. To ensure that students stay engaged and attentive during online classes, teachers need to come up with innovative ways. One such innovative method to increase student engagement is the use of instant polls. What are instant polls and how can they be used to increase student engagement? Let’s understand this in detail here:

How to Use Instant Polls for Student Engagement

It is important to make your classes interactive. As a teacher, you can ask a question during the classes, write a question on the blackboard that you are using, or the online whiteboard on Teachmint or it can be on the PDF file you are sharing. You can then move on to launch the instant poll and present your students with options.

For example, if you were teaching the students about tenses, the question can be,

‘Amita is playing’, identify the verb and the tense.

Options:

A. Past

B. Present

C. Past Continuous

D. Future

The students will then have to choose the right answer using the instant polls.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to use instant polls on Teachmint.

  1. Go live on Teachmint
  2. Ask your students the question that you want to by writing it on the blackboard or your online whiteboard or share the question through a PDF on your screen.
  3. Click on the options button and you will be able to see the ‘Live Polls’ option. (Img.1)
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4.Click on 'live polls' and you will be able to see the following option:

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5. Choose the time limit that you want to set and mark the correct option, the students won’t be able to see the screen while you are doing this.

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6. Click on the ‘launch instant poll’ button (Img.3)

7.The students will be presented with the following option:

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8. Once the students choose the answer, the teacher will be notified and the teacher can also choose to stop the poll before the selected time period.

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9. The teacher will then be able to see a poll analysis with the details such as how many students chose the correct answer, leader board, the time they took to answer the question, and likewise.

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Instant poll is an excellent way to increase student attention and interactivity in the online classroom. Teachers can use this to understand how much the students know about a topic, what is their engagement level and likewise. The best part is that it is simple and efficient.

Today, Teachmint offers education infrastructure to institutions and helps them digitize and automate their activities. It helps schools make smart decisions faster and aids in the learning process with a robust and efficient school ERP and LMS solutions respectively.

Here’s a video from Teachmint about the Live Polls feature: