How to use Microsoft Forms to create a poll and use it in a Teams meeting.
Polls are a great way to check students understanding, especially of a new topic. You can poll students anonymously (they will not find out who wrote which answer, but you can still see yourself), and you can also choose the share (or not) the collective responses of your students.
You can create a poll, a multiple choice question, using Microsoft Forms, then you can launch that question during a Teams meeting to survey your class’s thoughts about a subject.
- You will need to create your questions beforehand either in Teams of Microsoft Forms.
- You will need to add those questions to your meeting.
- You will need to launch those questions during your meeting.
- You can then share the results with your class, or not.
There are three types of poll questions you can use:
- Multiple Choice Poll -Create your question or statement, and then provide answer options from which your audience can choose.
- Multiple Choice Quiz -Mark a correct answer for your multiple choice quiz. You can have a single option as a correct answer, or more than one if you select Multiple answers.
- Word Cloud -When participants have given responses for an open text poll, a word cloud will be created to get a quick view of the top text phrases people answered.
Things to know
The easiest thing to do is prepare your poll questions in advance then add them to your meeting. You can also create and launch polls quickly during a meeting, but this takes concentration away from your teaching, so we recommend you prepare your questions in advance.
If you choose to share results automatically after voting, participants can see the bars of the poll results go up and down after they have voted until everyone has voted.
Participants can also vote before, during or even after the meeting has closed. You can launch a poll before/after the meeting starts/ends and all invitees to the meeting will be notified (through usual Teams notifications) that the poll has been launched.
You can also close a poll earlier if not everyone polled seems to be answering the poll and you want to show the results. You, as meeting organiser, can also view results in Microsoft Excel.
Teams creates an extra pane during a meeting so that you can launch polls as an when you need. You can create a poll during a meeting using this if there’s something you hurriedly want to ask that you didn’t think of beforehand.
Learn how to add a Poll to your next Teams class or meeting.
Hints and Tips
- You will need to add the Forms tab to your meeting to be able to create/run the poll.
- Create your questions in advance.
- You can type up to six different options into the multiple choice questions in the poll.
- You can run multiple polls in a meeting, at any point, in any order, included asking a question more than once.
- Questions in a poll can have multiple correct answers.
- You can edit/delete polls from meetings as you need.