Using Online Polls On Blogs

Do you use polls on your blog? I’ve never! And yet occasionally I’ll add my vote to an online poll but I’ve never taken the time to consider why bloggers use them on their blogs.

Why Bloggers Use Polls

Darren Rowse is an example of a blogger who regularly uses polls effectively on his blog, Problogger.

He normally runs a poll most months by posting the poll within the body of a post and displaying the poll in his side bar. This way readers who subscribed to his post by RSS are notified of the poll and people visiting his blog can add their vote to the poll in the sidebar.

Darren leaves voting is open for a few weeks after which he follows up with a post that reviews the results of the poll. Do You Most Want to Learn About Blogging? [POLL] is an example of the post he wrote to announce a poll and results are discussed in What You Want to Learn about Blogging [POLL RESULTS].

Polls provide different opportunities for gauging readers opinions compared to just asking questions in blog posts. Not all readers feel comfortable leaving comments in responses to questions. Polls means readers can express their opinion while maintaining their anonymity. They also provide you and visitors to your blog the chance to gain a sense of how your readers feel on topics since most online poll tools display the results once a visitor has voted.

There is a wide range of free online tools that you can use to create polls for your blog. I’ve created the poll below using Vizu to demonstrate how a poll works and to help me prioritize your needs. I’ve chosen 8 topics and I’d love to hear what you would like to learn more about so I can plan future posts on The Edublogger. Feel free to expand on your choice or add your own topic in comments.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Poll creation tools can be used in numerous ways with students. How have you/would you use these tools with your students? Which online poll tools have you used with your students? What were the advantage(s)/disadvantage(s) of the tools you used?

Don’t forget to add your vote to my poll on “What do you most want to learn more about” 🙂

This series of posts on poll creation tools was inspired by a Web 2.0 Wednesday task — please feel free to join us for Web 2.0 Wednesdays.

Image by Ben+Sam licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.0.

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