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I recently attended a lecture where the speaker used piece of software to interactively poll the audience and display the results. The particular solution was ResponseWare. What other solutions are available? Worth the money (if paid)? Pros and cons?

Please note, that I'm not interested in top 5 results of Google search.. I'd be more interested to hear personal experiences with specific software, both as a presenter or audience.

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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about software recommendations, and should be migrated accordingly.
    – user102
    Commented Nov 28, 2014 at 17:36
  • Even if it's not off-topic, Stack Exchanges generally frown upon "shopping list" or "recommendation list" type questions.
    – chipbuster
    Commented Nov 28, 2014 at 18:53
  • 2
    Software questions are not inherently off-topic at Academia.SE
    – ff524
    Commented Nov 28, 2014 at 19:18
  • As mentioned in the other question, what can the software provide that a show of hands can't?
    – Davidmh
    Commented Nov 28, 2014 at 23:57

2 Answers 2

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The Software Carpentry instructors do lots of presentations where they need/expect rapid, interactive feedback. They (especially Greg Wilson) have lots of experience of different ways of doing this. Note that their current method, that works extremely well, is to use different coloured sticky notes.

I haven't seen a technical solution that worked better; most are considerably worse. However, this is only practical for yes/no or multiple choice polls.

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  • Thanks - interesting to see low-tech solution from high-tech shop! =)
    – user203
    Commented Nov 29, 2014 at 14:09
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The organizers of a workshop I recently attended used Socrative to help drive discussion by letting attendees choose among topics that had been introduced during the first half of the session. I found it pretty effective, and since it is HTML5/JS driven, it doesn't need an app or download. You can access the site from any Internet-enabled device and watch the answers come in in real time.

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  • Thank - I'm leaning particularly towards no-app solutions and Socrative looks good indeed.
    – user203
    Commented Nov 29, 2014 at 14:11

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