How to take attendance with Poll Everywhere

Instructors can use Poll Everywhere to take attendance in three steps.

1. Register your students.
2. Present an activity.
3. Create a Gradebook report.

The video below gives a brief overview of these steps.

Keep reading for step-by-step instructions.

Register your students

Registering your students provides the necessary information to identify respondents.

The simplest way to register students is to import your roster using the bCourses using integration. Importing from bCourses creates a participant account for every student and groups them based on the course name. 

See the "Connecting your course to Poll Everywhere" section of the Integration Guide for Educators for directions on importing student rosters from bCourses.

Alternatively, you can register students by importing a CSV file. See the Importing students with a CSV article for more information.

Present an activity

Once you register students in your Poll Everywhere account, the next step is to create your attendance activity.

Any activity type will work for attendance. Many instructors use multiple-choice activities since these allow you to assign a correct answer.

1. Log in to Poll Everywhere and go to your 'Activities' page.
2. Select the '+ Activity' button and enter your question.
3. Enter response options, then select the check mark next to a response to mark it as correct.
4. Select the 'Create' button to create your activity.
5. Select 'Audience restriction & identity' then 'Registered Participants Only.'

Note: Be sure to enable "Registered participants only" for your attendance activity. This setting ensures that student responses are associated with their account.

See the Create an activity and Presenting from the web articles for more information.

Create a Gradebook report

After your students respond to your activity, you can create a report that shows how each person answered.

1. Log in to Poll Everywhere and go to your 'Reports' page.
2. Select the 'Create report' button.
3. Select 'Gradebook,' then select Continue.
4. Select the appropriate activities, then select 'Create report.'

Note: Select 'Participants' on the right-hand side and use the 'Group by' drop-down menu to filter different groups. Doing so will display the names of students who are part of that group, including those who did not respond.

See the Gradebook report article for more information.

You can transfer a Gradebook report from Poll Everywhere to bCourses, complete with overall participation scores and graded multiple-choice activities. 

See the "Exporting a Gradebook report" section of the Integration Guide for Educators for directions on transferring a report to bCourses.