What is Poll Everywhere?

Poll Everywhere is a web-based tool for making presentations interactive. Instructors can engage students, gauge their understanding, and get feedback in real time. It can be used inside or outside of Blackboard.

Account Creation

Syracuse University has an institutional license to use Poll Everywhere for faculty, staff, and students.

If you have an existing Poll Everywhere account, please email help@syr.edu to have your account added to the university license.

Instructors that do not have accounts can create them:

  1. Visit Poll Everywhere

  2. Click Login

  3. Enter your @syr.edu email address and click next

  4. Click Login with Syracuse University

  5. If you are logged in to other university resources you may already be logged in. If prompted, complete the normal campus login process.

If you attempt to login from Blackboard before you have an account, you may see a password reset page. Do not use the reset option; click the text option that reads “log in now.”

Accessing Poll Everywhere

Student Access

If you are a student and you are responding to polls in Poll Everywhere for your course, please visit https://su-jsm.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/blackboard01/pages/221218178/Poll+Everywhere+Getting+Started+for+Students for more information on how to use Poll everywhere as a participant.

Students cannot make presentations by default but can get presenter access by emailing help@syr.edu.

Direct Access

Users can access Poll Everywhere at  https://www.polleverywhere.com/  or  http://polleverywhere.syr.edu. Sign in using your complete @syr.edu email.

Access via Blackboard 

Poll Everywhere can be integrated with Blackboard. To sync your course roster and transfer results to the Blackboard grade book, you must create and then access Poll Everywhere through the link that you created in Blackboard as shown below.

To add a Poll Everywhere Link in your Blackboard course, select the “purple plus sign” in Course Content area by clicking in between two content items. If you have not added any content to your course, select “Add Content” on your Course Content area.

Drop-down menu from the purple plus sign that has options for create, auto-generate modules, copy content, upload, cloud storage, content market, and content collection

Scroll through the tools on the Content Market page until you see Poll Everywhere which will be near the bottom of the list. Click directly on the circled plus sign in the bottom right of the tile to add a Poll Everywhere link on your Course Content page. Clicking on the tile itself will lead you to Poll Everywhere.

If you wish to sync Poll Everywhere results with your Blackboard course, a Poll Everywhere link is required in your course.

Image showing Poll Everywhere Card in Content Market with Circled Plus sign.

When you are back on your Course Content page you will see the Poll Everywhere link there.  If you have multiple courses and would like to use Poll Everywhere for each of them, a link needs to be created in each course. 

Image showing Poll Everywhere link on Course Content page.

Clicking on the Poll Everywhere link directly brings you to the Poll Everywhere platform for login access. Click on the blue “Continue to developer.blackboard.com” button. 

Image showing Poll Everywhere page with the Continue to developer.blackboard.com.

Once you click on the blue button, the Poll Everywhere page will appear. You can see a left ribbon panel where the Home icon is denoted by the arrow. You should see the name of your course as well as options to Add New Gradebook and/or Synch Roster. At the top left hand side you can see a navigation previous link that gives you access to all of your Courses which includes any courses you have already synced with Poll Everywhere.

Image shows the Course page with the name of the course and the Add New Gradebook button and the Synch Roster button. There is an orange arrow pointed at the left panel at the Home icon.

Creating Activities in Poll Everywhere

A Poll Everywhere ‘Activity’ is a single question or prompt you pose to your audience. Activities allow presenters to gather responses or questions from the audience. 

Step 1: To create an activity, tap the Activity button on your Activities page.

Image of My activities area on Poll Everywhere.com with a green box around a blue button that has a plus sign and Activity next to it

Step 2: Select the activity you would like to create for the audience from the Activity Creator Tool. You can choose from the main 7 activities (Multiple choice, Word cloud, Q&A, etc.) or find more templates when you hit the More button on the right.

Step 3: Then enter your question or prompt. 

Image of create activity screen with Multiple choice option shown

Step 4: Click the Create button to save the activity to your account or click Add another activity instead and this will save your Activity and take you back to the Activity creator tool, where you can create more activities.

To create reports, sync with Blackboard, or add activities to presentations, please visit the links below.

Additional Helpful Links