Have you ever wanted to have the ability to ask polling questions in your online courses? AddPoll can help you do that!
AddPoll is an online website that allows you to create online surveys, polls and forms. Creation of these items is fast and easy! The free account provides you with the following features:
- Unlimited poll votes per month
- Unlimited questions per survey
- 250 survey and form responses per month
- 10MB of storage
- Custom branding design
- Ability to export your data
- Real-time detailed results
- Responsive design for mobile devices
STEP 1: Sign Up for your FREE Add Poll Account
To get started with Add Poll, you’ll need to sign up for your free AddPoll account. Go to http://www.addpoll.com/ and provide your email address, create a username and a password. Click on the large yellow/orange button that says Start now, it’s free!
STEP 2: Create Your Online Poll
Once you’ve created your free AddPoll account, you’re ready to create your first poll! Go to the AddPoll page (http://www.addpoll.com/) and click on the “Login” button in the upper-right corner of the screen.
When you log in, you should land on the Dashboard area of your account. There is an orange button that says “+Start New”. Click on it to start creating your first poll.
You’ll get five different options to choose from on this page: Poll, Flash Poll, Survey, Form, and Quiz. Since this article covers have to build a poll, you’ll choose between Poll and Flash Poll. My recommendation is to choose just the normal Poll option. Flash Poll will turn your Poll into a flash object, and some flash objects do not embed well into online courses. The normal Poll option is a javascript based poll and should work with very little problem in an online course (or on a website!).
Creating a new poll gives you a variety of different options. I’m only going to go over the basic options, but I encourage you to take your time and explore the others and adjust them to your liking. Most of them are self-explanatory. If you aren’t sure though, look for the round gray button that has the white “?” inside of it. Mousing over this item will give you additional information about the settings-area that you are looking at.
Give your poll a title and answer choices. You can add as many new answers as you want. You can also choose to let users enter their own answers. There are two gray boxes on the right side of the screen that you will want to look over and adjust as needed – these are additional settings that control voting settings, security, and sharing of the poll. Notice that both the poll title and the answer types have the option to attach media (either an image or audio file) to them. This will provide you with more flexibility to be creative in your polling. For example, you could attach a piece of audio to the polling title and then ask students how they feel about it. Or you can provide students with a word in the poll title and then ask them to select an image that they feel best suits that word.
If you scroll to the second half of the poll-creation page you will see that you can choose what kind of answer type you want your poll to be. Radio button and Drop down list will allow users the choice to select only one answer. The checkbox feature will allow users the ability to select multiple answer choices. Select the answer choice type that best fits your need. Additionally, on the right side, you’ll notice that you can choose to close the poll after a certain date (it can always be reopened later if needed). And right below that you get an option to select different templates/styles for your poll. You can make it look as creative or as simple as you want! (Note: The Poll Templates in grey are not available to you unless you upgrade your account.) Selecting from the pre-made available templates will be the fastest and easiest way to create your poll, but if you have an idea in mind for how you want it to look, you can always choose “Custom Style” and create a style just for you (you can define your own colors, choose an image for the background, etc).
If you are just starting out, I’d recommend that you select a premade template (if you want help creating a custom style, please contact OC Global and we’d be happy to send you detailed instructions!) and then click “Save and Continue”.
On the next screen you should see your completed poll!
If you don’t like the way it looks or need to make changes to it, you can do so by clicking on “Dashboard” and then selecting “Edit” under the poll name.
STEP 3: Embed Your Poll In Blackboard
Once you’ve created a poll, you can share it in your course. You can share polls anywhere in the course where you have access to a text editor box (for example – announcements, content areas, discussion boards, tests, etc). To get started with adding it to your course, you have to first get the sharing code from AddPoll. To do this, log into your AddPoll account. Logging in should put you on your Dashboard page. From the Dashboard page, locate the poll you want to share and mouse your cursor over the poll name. When you do this you will notice that a list of options in text will appear below the poll name. The one you are interested in is “Publish and Share.” Click on it.
The best way to share the code is through JavaScript (this option comes up by default when “Publish and Share” is selected). Click on the link on the page that says “Copy to clipboard” to easily have the code copied for you (this option is only available if Adobe Flash is active in your browser). If you don’t have the option for “Copy to Clipboard”, simply highlight all of the code in the box and copy it manually by using right-click+copy or ctrl+c (Windows)/command+c (Mac).
Now to go Blackboard and locate the course you’d like to embed the file in. You can embed these files in a variety of areas (honestly any area where text is allowed – content areas, announcements, discussion boards, etc). For this example I’m going to show you how to embed it in a content area. Click on “Coursework” and make sure Edit Mode is ON. From the “Build” option select “Item.”
The text that you copied is text that is written in Javascript/HTML code, so, we want to make sure we paste it properly! If you paste it into the text editor box as it is right now, it will just look like a mess! To do this properly, you want to make sure that you can see all three tool bars in the text editor box (if you don’t, click on the double-down arrow in the upper right corner of the box to expand the toolbars). On the third toolbar, you should see an icon called “HTML” second from the end. Click on it.
You’ll get a new pop-up window for the HTML code view. Right-click inside of the white area and select “Paste”. Your pasted text should look similar to the image below. After you’ve pasted your code, hit the “Update” button in the bottom-right corner.
When you look at your text editor you’ll notice that you probably don’t see ANYTHING in the text box. But, that is okay! Your code is there – it is just in the background. You’ll need to hit “Submit” before you’ll see the poll appear.
If you’ve done everything correctly, your poll should show in Blackboard in the item you created!
IMPORTANT: Because you are pasting this poll as a JavaScript Object, if you choose to EDIT this content item in Blackboard after you’ve submitted, Blackboard may get wonky with you and change your code and cause your poll not to display anymore. I recommend that once you create a content item/announcement/discussion/etc with a poll in it that you DO NOT EDIT IT. If you absolutely have to edit it, be prepared to replace the embed code for the Poll.
Students can see the results of the poll once they vote – if you set it that way. During the poll creation you can choose if results can be displayed. Additionally, you can also choose to restrict voting by single vote or multiple votes, etc. It all depends on your preference and how you want to set the poll up!
STEP 4: View Results
You can use your AddPoll Dashboard to view the results of polls that you have embedded in your course(s). Log in to AddPoll with your account information and it should put you on the AddPoll Dashboard. Click on the name of the poll that you want to view the results of.
This will take you to a page where you can review a summary of the results in numerical and graphical form.
If you are interested in using this data in a report or elsewhere, you can choose to export the data to PDF, CSV, or Word (or you can Print it out!).
If you have any questions about how to set up or use AddPoll for your courses, please let us know and we’d be happy to help!