This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
Slido is my preferred polling tool for live meetings and events. It’s the easiest, quickest way to engage people in a remote session. I’ve used it in hundreds of teaching sessions, workshops, and meetings in recent years. If you’ve been in a live session with me, chances are you’ve seen it. Read on for its features, limitations, and alternatives—along with a short video demo—and try this live poll to see what it’s like.
What is Slido?
Slido is a Web-based service for creating poll questions and then displaying and downloading responses.
I use it for:
Icebreakers in live meetings
Posing questions in classes
Gathering ideas, opinions, and feedback in workshop or conference sessions
Here are a bunch of other uses for panels, team retrospectives, and so on.
Benefits
Learn about the people you’re with and enable them to learn about one another.
Engage people as contributors so they’re not sitting passively.
Gather real-time input so you can adjust your agenda or materials accordingly.
How to use it
Create a free account, then create your first event.
Add a few questions of your own or adapt from templated questions.
Copy the link Slido creates for your event. Paste it into your live meeting chat if you’re hosting an online event. For an in-person event, display the event’s QR code on your presentation screen so participants can respond on their phones. Or turn the event link into a simple shareable URL (with bit.ly, for example) that you can share in an event program or on a whiteboard.
Show the results. Once participants have started responding, share your screen to show Slido’s excellent poll results display to let participants see, in real time, what everyone is saying.
Slido features I find useful
Once logged in, just type poll.new in any Chrome window to open an instant poll. I’ve found this super useful for creating impromptu polls for events, classes and meetings. I sometimes use this to launch new poll questions on the spur of the moment, when I haven’t set up an event in advance.
A Q&A tab is available for each Slido event you set up. So, in addition to answering your poll questions, participants can ask their own questions. It’s a great way to collect live queries. Participants can also upvote others’ questions, giving you a sense of which topics are of shared interest. That’s useful at large events for determining which questions a speaker should address.
The large QR code that displays when you show the presenter view makes it easy for anyone to join your Slido poll in a live session.
Embed Slido questions in a Google Slides presentation with this useful add-on. Your participants will see live poll questions and results automatically on your slides. If you use PowerPoint on Windows, you can use this Slido plug-in.
An ideas tab can also be enabled for gathering ideas on any prompt, which is useful for group brainstorming. In my experience some users don’t notice the ideas tab, so this capability doesn’t work as well as it could.
The quiz feature lets you pull random trivia questions in to add a fun element to meetings or events. It integrates the Open Trivia Database so you don’t have to spend lots of time making up questions and answers.
A useful collection of templates helps provide ideas for poll questions for various circumstances, so you never have to start from scratch.
An optional free switcher app—available for both Mac & Windows—lets you easily alternate between showing your slides and your poll questions.
Slido limitations
You can only pose one question at a time. A workaround is to host a live survey that includes several questions. But if people are answering one question or survey and you want to ask a new follow-up for those who are done, you can’t change the active question without interrupting those answering the existing question.
The respondent metrics are of limited use. It would be nice to have an easier way to compare responses of one group to those of another group.
You can’t customize the way question text looks on participants’ screens or enlarge the small text.
If you set up a lot of poll questions for an event or a class, there’s not a great way to organize them.
Longer word cloud poll answers sometimes get cut off.
Pricing: Free for up to three questions per event and up to 100 participants. $12/month for unlimited questions and 200 participants.
Alternatives
Poll Everywhere is unique in enabling people to respond to polls with text messages. And unlike Slido, it lets you create clickable image questions. I’ve used that to ask people to drop a pin where they’d love to travel on a map, or to highlight something they find challenging on a business model canvas. The free plan has a maximum of 25 respondents, as compared with Slido’s 100. The free higher-ed plan lets you have 40 student respondents.
Kahoot started out to enable people to create trivia and quiz games. Its features have expanded. Now you can use it to gather ideas, opinions, or reactions. It’s still best for quiz games and playful meeting breaks. But you can also use it to share a video and have people respond to it. And you can actually use it to share slides with questions in between. Pricing is complicated; free plans only allow 10 respondents.
Mentimeter lets you create slides with questions on them. With paid plans, you can import your presentations from Keynote, PowerPoint or Google Slides and add questions in between slides. I like how this service enables people to add comments or questions on any of your slides, if you activate that feature. It’s helpful because you can choose when to show those questions or comments or look at them privately, and it allows participants to react right on your slide, without moving to a separate screen tab.
Zoom pollingis convenient, but the new advanced poll options require participants to have updated software. Slido’s numerous questions types—word cloud, open text, multiple choice, respond to a picture, star rating, ranking—make it more flexible, and Slido has a better presentation view when you’re sharing poll results.
Pear Deck is another great resource for adding live questions to a presentation by embedding questions and interactions right into your slides.
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
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