Over the last week Twitter has been rolling out a new polling feature to its users. The new polling option allows you to post a Tweet that contains a short poll question. Using a poll is different than just asking people to reply to a question that you Tweet. When you post a poll people don’t have to reply to you with an “@” reply. Instead of sending a written reply people just choose from one of your response choices. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how the new polling feature works.

Applications for Education

Twitter polls could be useful in large professional development settings in which you want to quickly get a sense of the participants’ level of interest in a particular topic. Twitter polls could also be useful for sparking discussion in a social studies/ current events course. Post a poll about an issue and then discuss the results with your students.