Canvas @ Yale

Configuring Your Poll in Poll Everywhere

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Once you have created your poll, you can customize numerous aspects of how the poll will look and behave. This guide will cover the main options within your poll's Configuration sections.

Configure Sections

After you have created your poll, you will be given the opportunity to "Configure" it using the right-hand panel and toggling open the configuration section headers, which are detailed below.

"How people can respond" Section

This section lets you select how people can respond to your poll.

By default both the "Website" and "Text messaging" options should be selected. This allows people to respond both by website / app, and via text message if a participant does not have a smart device.

Your Poll Everywhere activity has a specif code generated for it (blurred in the image above) which will guide where participants should go / send their responses to when answering the poll.

"Audience restriction & identity" Section

This section lets you choose how you would like participants to be identified (if at all), and if you want to require participants to have to log in before answering your poll.

  1. "Who can participate?" - This options lets you choose whether you want anyone with your response link to be able to answer without logging in (Everyone - no restrictions) or require people to log in with their Yale credentials to answer your poll (Restrict to registered participants only).
    1. If you intend to track your student responses by user for grading purposes or otherwise, you will want to restrict to registered participants only.

Participants will not have to register with you specifically if you select "Restrict to registered participants only." Participants will only log in via SSO (Single Sign On) using their Yale credentials to answer your poll.

  1. "How do you want to identify participants?" - If you are allowing everyone to participate without restrictions, you can select if you want to identify people by a chosen screen name / auto-generated ID (this option can be selected within your Poll Everywhere account settings) or have people respond completely anonymously.
    1. If you are restricting to registered participants you will have the option to identify participants by their full name and email or completely anonymously.  
"Response Settings" Section

This section allows you to customize how you would like people to be able to respond to your poll.

  1. "Each person may respond" -  lets you select how many times a person can answer your poll. If you are asking a question where a participant may be prompted to select a number of different answers, you can customize the behavior here.
  2. "Each option may be selected" -  lets you choose if you want to allow people to select the same answer more than once, if you are allowing more than one answer.
  3. "Participant results chart" -  lets you select whether or not you want the results of the poll to show up on the participant device or only on the presenter screen.
  4. "Change answer" - lets you set if you would like people to be able to change their answer after selecting an answer option in your poll.
  5. "Show activity title" - lets you choose if you want to show the question/prompt on participant devices as well as on the presentation screen
  6. "Custom reply message" - lets you choose if you would like to send a custom reply back to participants after an answer is selected. Selecting the option to send a reply will provide a text box to craft your reply message.
"Schedule lock/unlock times" Section

This section lets you determine if you would like to set a custom lock and unlock time for a poll. If you are going to be using poll through presentation software like PowerPoint and want people to respond immediately, this section can be ignored. 

  1. "Auto-unlock time" - lets you select the automatic unlock time by specifying a specific amount of time in the future to a custom date and time. You can also elect to not automatically unlock in which case you will need to manually unlock the poll so that it ready to receive poll responses.
  2. "Auto-lock time" - lets you select the automatic lock time by specifying a specific amount of time in the future to a custom date and time. You can also elect to not automatically lock in which case you will need to manually lock the poll so that it no longer receives poll responses.

For more assistance, please contact [email protected].

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