Poll Everywhere = cure for the laptop wall

OK, it's not a cure, but this slick web application is one way to get students engaged and using their laptops, handhelds, and cell phones in class for something other than updating their Facebook status during a lecture. After I blogged this morning about the "laptop wall" often encountered in universities, @efeldhusen sent me a link via Twitter to Poll Everywhere; it isn't perfect, but it's well worth a look (and certainly gives a hint of where we might be heading with interactive communication tools).

Poll Everywhere is a service that lets you create polls (no surprise there); collect responses via text message, the web, or Twitter; and display the results in real time on the web or in a downloadable PowerPoint slide show. The poll can be embedded in a web page (forgive the content of this poll; it was just a quick test to see how Poll Everywhere worked):