With SMSPoll, found at http://www.smspoll.net/, teachers can set up online polls that can be utilized in real time during class room lectures.
With SMSPoll, teachers will be able to engage their students with animated graphs and other special methods for displaying collective classroom sentiment and opinions in real time. Whereas in the past the only way to gauge the aggregate opinion of a class was through a "show of hands", SMSPoll could completely change group dynamics in the classroom. Here is just an example of what a SMSPoll display looks like:
SMSPoll has its own web page dedicated to educational usage, which can be found here: http://www.smspoll.net/educators.php.
Advantages: As SMSPoll writes themselves, teachers can "involve all students in the learning process, keeping them engaged,
improving their knowledge retention, and assessing their understanding
and retention of course material."
Also, SMSPoll in general seems committed to a fluid web experience by offering the embedding of of polls in PowerPoints and blogs. Nice to see form a company.
Disadvantages: Obviously, students would have to use their cells phones to send SMS (text) messages and participate in the polling. This might violate some existing rules about cell phone usage in the schools. However, SMSPoll has a "Web Voting" feature, too. With "Web Voting" enabled, your students will be able to participate from their computers, IPads, etc.
Also, although there is no limit to how many polls you can have, there is a limit to how many "votes" you can receive. The limit per poll is not very high - only 15. As we all know, most classrooms are not 15 students or below (what a dream that would be). Charges start at $20/month when you want to receive 50 votes. Here is the pricing page: http://www.smspoll.net/packages.php. So, although the charges are unfortunate, I still think SMSPoll is usable in spite of the limitations.
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