If you’re looking to energize presentations, engage participants in real-time, or gather quick feedback from your audience, Poll Everywhere might be just the tool you need. Poll Everywhere is available to all Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) educators and staff through a Cornell enterprise license.
With Poll Everywhere, you can go beyond traditional hand-raising or static PowerPoint slides; this easy-to-use platform helps make meetings, trainings, and workshops more interactive and insightful. You can integrate live polls, quizzes, word clouds, crowdsource responses, and open-ended questions directly into your session—whether you’re presenting on Zoom, in Microsoft Teams, or in person. Participants can respond from their phones, tablets, or laptops using a QR code, link or by texting a code.
I’ve been using Poll Everywhere for over 12 years. I’m quick to share that it has become easier to use and more reliable. Here are a couple of examples from my experiences:
- At a recent staff training I used a PowerPoint that had poll everywhere embedded into several of the slides to help staff engage in the topic (an anchoring exercise for those of you who follow my program development work), then we crowdsourced ideas to help shape the agenda (participants add their ideas and then vote up the ideas of others to better understand the interests of the audience), and then we did a closing exercise to set intentions (an aspiration setting activity). I was able to show results to the audience, but also save the results in my Poll Everywhere account so that I can refer back to them later. Wins all around.
- Many moons ago, while working with the State 4-H Office, we incorporated dialogue prompts into different parts of the Career Ex agenda. The volunteer teens and adults leading sessions asked their groups the questions and shared the QR code so that the students could provide feedback throughout the course of the event (and use their devices for the good of the whole :)).
Want to get started? CCE staff can request access through Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation https://teaching.cornell.edu/learning-technologies/assessment-tools/classroom-polling/poll-everywhere. If you already have a Poll Everywhere account, using your Cornell email, your license will automatically upgrade and preserve all your existing activities. Once logged in at polleverywhere.com, you’ll find a dashboard where you can create new polls, customize visual settings, and manage participants and reports.
Poll Everywhere is a strong alternative to other tools you may already use. It offers more robust features than Zoom polls and can effectively replace tools that we don’t have a license for, like Menti. For more complex surveys or detailed data analysis, Qualtrics may still be the better option—but for live engagement, Poll Everywhere strikes the right balance between simplicity and power.
If you’re interested in incorporating Poll Everywhere into your slide presentations, you can download the dedicated app for PowerPoint from the Poll Everywhere website. More details on this option can be found on the CCE Staff Bulletin page: https://staff.cce.cornell.edu/units/cce-staff-bulletins
Want to see it in action? There are tutorials, webinars, and guides available to help you get up to speed:
And of course, if you run into any trouble, help is just an email away: cce-orgdev@cornell.edu
So go ahead—request your license, explore your dashboard, and try building your first activity. Poll Everywhere makes it easier than ever to turn a passive audience into an active part of the conversation.
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