Polls can be used to create a data-driven classroom.  Data takes many forms and has many uses in education, but this particular data gathering method can give you data tailored to you or data tailored to individual courses.  Students are our customers, and when we continually gauge our customers’ satisfaction and make adjustments, we get valuable data and our customers see how important they are to us.

Data from polls can show whether students in your class feel like they are ‘getting it,’ which makes polling a formative assessment tool.  It can also show what students think about the tools they are using, which can drive future course revisions.  Polling can even show you how students are feeling about your performance: are you answering email fast enough, are you available enough, and are you getting to the grading fast enough?  Polling can also show you how students are feeling about their own performance -asking the question can help teach students a valuable lesson in responsibility as their answers give them ownership of their outcomes.

This tutorial shows how teachers can add polls to blackboard courses.  Remember, a poll can be used in an announcement or after a mini-lesson, direct instruction, or assessment to get feedback… it can be used anywhere!  To get data about a course rather than an individual teacher, these polls could be added during course development and reset every semester from a central polldaddy site.  I’ll go over that in a future broadcast.