Social Distancing Trivia Nights using Poll Everywhere
Looking for something fun to do with your friends while self isolating?
Around this time every year my friends and I start going to the pub on Tuesday nights for Trivia. We love it. We play as a team, each person has different trivia knowledge that helps the team. We don’t win, but we have a lot of fun.
With social distancing in effect and being responsible citizens (plus the pub’s not open) we are all staying home right now and don’t get to see each other at all. We had the idea of doing Trivia for each other once a week remotely.
A while ago a friend and colleague of mine told me about www.PollEverywhere.com, I have used it to poll an audience during a presentation on a couple of occasions. It’s a very cool product, you can author your question on their website, after setting up an account of course. I have a free account which allows for an audience size of 25 people and unlimited questions. This past experience gave me an idea.
I can use Poll Everywhere for Trivia with my friends.
We have been playing for a few weeks now, it’s lot of fun. Everyone looks forward to it each week.
Here is how we do it.
First I author questions on the PollEverywhere web site. You need to have a username, this is how my friends will find my questions. On a paid account you can select one but since I use a free account the website generates one for me. On the Poll Everywhere website go to My Settings to generate one you would like to use.
To create your questions select Polls and click Add Activity. I’m not going to teach you how to use Poll Everywhere here. There are lots of resources on their web site for that.
However I will give you the benefit of experience.
Poll everywhere has many different types of questions. Multiple choice, word cloud, Q&A, clickable image, survey.
For Trivia I always use the “Competitions” style of question. For one great reason, it comes with a built in leader board.
The competition question type also has some fun options you can apply to the competition.
We have flipped between Allowing participants to change their answer before the time is up and having it locked in as soon as they make a selection. The timer will lock the question and not allow answers once it runs out.
Once you have all your questions entered. Download and install the PollEverywhere add-in for either PowerPoint or Google Slides.
I installed the Poll Everywhere add-in for PowerPoint.
Then I use that to insert my questions into a PowerPoint presentation.
Now for the audience participation part, on Trivia night the audience can use their phone to answer the question. Either via a website (www.pollev.com/myusername) or the poll everywhere app. When I put my PowerPoint deck in presentation mode it uses Poll Everywhere to update the app for anyone who is connected to my presentation.
Let me show you:
Before Trivia night I send out a meeting request with a link to a Microsoft Teams meeting. We use Teams to chat with each other, also so I can show the questions to everyone. You can use any video conference software you like.
On trivia night my friends join the online meeting and open their Poll Everywhere apps on their phones and select my presentation. (Username)
As I present the slides to the participants their Poll everywhere app is updated. For example when I get to a slide with a question the app will display the question to everyone.
Once all the participants have made a selection, I transition to the next slide which shows how everyone voted.
After a moans, groans and cheers. The next slide shows a leaderboard to reflect the standings so far. With the competition style question, the faster participants answer the more points they get.
Meanwhile on everyone's phone it’s showing them the same things, The correct answer and the leaderboard. Each slide I click through changes the display on their phones, while I am showing it to everyone in the presentation in Teams.
Thank you @polleverywhere you have helped make isolation a little more tolerable and brought a bunch of friends together when they can’t be.
