MuseForJews

Soliciting audience feedback while giving a lecture can help teachers better understand their audience and help them tweak their presentations to fit.. 

These free, technology based tools can help you easily poll your audience for their thoughts:

Poll Everywhere: Poll Everywhere is one of the oldest audience participation tools and it remains a favorite of presenters and teachers. Using the app, you simply ask your audience a question. Audience members then answer using the app or by navigating to a specific URL on their own devices. Poll Everywhere will then assemble their responses and display them visually in a custom bar chart.

Poll Everywhere is available via a browser or iOS app, and you can embed polls in Keynote, PowerPoint or Google Slide presentations. Sign up for free for a K-12 account. You can display up to 40 responses per poll.  If you’d like to be able to display more responses, you can do so with a paid account.

Google Slides offers your audience members the ability to submit questions, and then vote on which questions they are most interested in learning the answers to. To launch it, enter presenter view from your slideshow, and click “new” under Audience Tools. A URL will appear where your audience members can submit their questions. For a more detailed explanation of this feature, visit EdSurge here.

In Your Classroom

• Anonymous polling is a good way to get feedback from your students, including those that might be shy about participating.
• Keep your polls simple. They can be a powerful way to solicit feedback, but only if they are simple and easy to understand.
• Be sure to understand the limitations of free accounts. There’s nothing more frustrating than users trying to weigh in and finding out that the limit has been exceeded.