Have You Met…Slido?

Sometimes you have a burning question. Sometimes that question can’t be acknowledged by a raised hand alone. Sometimes that question needs to be posted, but might not be appropriate for Twitter. Enter Slido, an online polling and sharing tool that allows users to remotely connect to your hosted session via a uniquely generated code and submit poll answers or written questions to send to your synced up, fairly live stream of content on the big screen.

Getting started is as simple as signing up for an account, which for basic use is completely free. Once that’s activated, you’ll be invited to create your first event and given the code for your visitors, students or audience to join in.

At this point on the free plan you’ll get to decide on if you would like to run a live poll or to leave the floor open to questions and comments. As content rolls in the large join message on the screen will be replaced with a stream of submitted questions and detail on whom submitted it. This approach is perfect for those streaming into a presentation or conference who can then have members send in questions anytime or participate in a poll wherever in the world they observe the session  rather than a show of hands limited to the teaching space. When managing your questions on the standard admin view (which you may open on as many computers as you like and they’ll still all stay in sync), you can also highlight questions to display them in a featured manner – quite useful if you’ve got several of them on the screen.

On the user side, the website is highly responsive, adapting to your audience’s devices easily and allowing users of all shapes and sizes to join in. Questions and Polls are listed separately allowing them to switch between each activity,  whether you separate them out or run them simultaneously allowing the user to submit at any time.

Once your event is complete, you can archive it for a later date meaning you don’t have to scramble to download all the data for analysis.

All of this is a fairly substantial offering for free and for a basic organisational or educational tool is quite powerful for such modest requirements of a modern internet browser. Of course if you want more, there are paid options, coming in at 3 higher tiers of £119/$154, £199/$257 and £599/$775, each per event. Advanced features include the ability to export the data to a file, add branding to white-label the product, embed the system into another site or to even run multiple slido events at the same time in different rooms.

If you’d like to try out Slido for yourself, feel free to click on the link to the right of this post to be taken to the site. The link will be the same whether you are presenting or participating, with the divide occurring when presenters log into their account and participants type in the event code (beginning with a # on screen). Have you used Slido before? Please feel free to leave a comment and explain your experiences and view on the tool.

 

Mike

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