What a great write up and synopsis of how you feel about these 2 different tools. As one of the co-founders of Poll Everywhere, we are constantly talking with our educational customers and specifically have incorporated a ton of their feedback into the product. In fact, this week specifically has a new feature for EDU users every single day. Check out http://blog.polleverywhere.com to follow along.

First a quick but important correction: The class size limit is now 40 and we also have a classroom size promise: http://www.polleverywhere.com/faq#class-size-promise

The classroom size promise is for those few teachers who have exceptionally large classes (e.g. the music class, often upwards of 60 or 80 students) so this takes care of any teacher with any particular class size who can use Poll Everywhere for free, as long as they want to.

Also, we in fact are quite education-centric. Our CEO, Jeff Vyduna, was previously the CIO of a school district. Just wanted to point out that while Poll Everywhere is also extremely useful and popular in non-education circles, one of our primary goals is increasing the utility and pedagogical uses for Poll Everywhere for teachers and students.

As for being established, we have hundreds of thousands of educators worldwide, many of whom use Poll Everywhere on a daily or semi-daily basis.

A couple things stand out for me about mobile devices in general, such as the distraction they may pose for some students during class. This is, sadly, a limitation of using mobile devices with *any* product that utilizes them, not the least of which the 2 you are talking about in this post. They key is to involve students in meaningful activity while recognizing that technology alone is not going to solve the all-too-human problem of classroom management, whether passively daydreaming or actively tuning out and texting friends. We all want to believe we can “fix” that problem but sadly there really isn’t a fix for that dynamic. We do believe, however, that utilizing mobile devices which have been cast by school administrator to be distractions can be very useful to students and instructors, and will reduce the opportunity for unnecessary distractions. What we have seen is that teachers using Poll Everywhere well do see increased engagement from students. In fact, students are amazed that they can text their teacher in class and love doing it.

As for ad-hoc questions, we see most teachers just creating and delivering polls right from their web browser or a tablet browser, and they don’t pre-plan everything in a deck prepared ahead of time. Try it this way and you may be surprised.

Most of our features were built from receiving good suggestions from people like you. Email me personally sean [at] polleverywhere.com and you might just see your ideas on the site in a week!

In fact, if you don’t mind, I’d love to email some sneak peaks of things coming up and perhaps ask a couple other things about your opinions on using phones with students for learning. Do you have a way to contact you privately (email is fine)?

Sean

I did ask the IT department right away; nope. I hadn’t thought of dropbox, but we do have a network server that I can use. Those tend to be slow, and like you said, I’d have to configure it on my laptop at home alone. So, I’m going to check on the options in #3.

My main concern is that I’ve been using Papers and Bookends for all my pdfs and there is no way to transfer those to a PC that I am aware of.