Engaging 100 radiology students with innovative polling

Dr. Vikas Shah teaches his radiology students with quizzes, word clouds, and X-rays as clickable image polls

Dr. Vikas Shah is a Consultant Radiologist at the University Hospitals of Leicester in the UK. In his teaching activities for the hospital, Leicester Medical School, and at seminars across the world, Dr. Shah utilizes Poll Everywhere’s wide range of polls to engage big classes.

How do you engage 100 students in real time?

Dr. Shah teaches medical students, junior doctors, and radiology trainees all over the world. For example, he taught a course on Abdominal MRI for the JCA Seminars Body MRI Course, a multi-day class at the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney, Australia.

His seminars can include as many as 100 students, and it can be a challenge to engage them all. He uses Poll Everywhere throughout his training sessions to keep things fun and interesting.

Use varied Poll Everywhere activities to keep everyone engaged

Dr. Shah uses two screens when presenting. His PowerPoint presentation fills the first, and the poll results are visible on the second. When he puts an image on screen, students can see both the image the question refers to and the poll results simultaneously.

He uses all poll types: it may be a multiple choice question or an open-ended question viewed as a word cloud or a ticker. But the most powerful, he says, is the clickable image poll.

By using a radiology image as a clickable image poll for diagnostic training, Dr. Shah’s students can click the specific part of the body where they think the pathology lies, rather than a simple multiple choice question listing potential problem areas.

Dr. Shah couldn’t be happier with the results. He feels that with almost universal smartphone and tablet ownership amongst his students, adapting his teaching to using live polls is key to continued positive feedback.