I know some districts that use Moodle as their student response system, and I’ve started work on my own. I like the idea above where the polling should be combined with something like Google moderator.

I should have more time this summer to finish mine to let people beat on it. I’m going to use Textmarks.com to accept responses from SMS (that’s what PollEverywhere.com used before they got their own short message code).

First with my administrator hat on — if you standardize on a single system on campus students pay once for the hardware, you can do faculty development on a large scale to get many instructors using them, and in the process help them reinvent pedagogy to use them well.

As an edu-geek what I really want are tools like Harvard’s Live Question Tool or even an open version of Google Moderator. What is more important to me is classroom interaction that comes from the students — not a system where I stand in the front and pummel them with more multiple choice questions, but an environment where live questions come in from them so I have to shift my teaching on the fly. I say screw the polling and go with helping students get real about participation — if they are too afraid to ask out loud I am sure they’ll ask via a text message or a simple form field. Let them move the discussion, rate other questions, vote on important issues, and push us around.

That’s my 2 cents on the whole thing.

@alec – UMLAUT-M also sounds interesting – is it an SMS bridge to Moodle?

@Chris – I’d _completely_ forgotten about Google Docs forms! It’s got the web side of things pretty close to what I’m imagining – except there should be a way to modify the questions on the fly so it could be used in a tighter feedback/response loop in a class without having everyone do a bunch of navigation to find the “current” question. But yeah – Google Docs Forms is the closest I’ve seen – different question types, flexible, anonymous (or not, as needed), with decent summaries and analysis of responses. Very cool.