📊 Polls, shared notes, and the vibe check

Chat is where the conversation happens, but three smaller tools let you hear from the whole room at once: live polls, a shared notes doc the class writes together, and a one-tap vibe check. All three run right on top of the projector overlay.

Live polls

Once a session is running, press Poll on the Live tab (or 📊 Poll in the projector view), type anything you'd ask out loud, and press Ask. It goes live on every device. Students answer in a few typed words, and a classmate who agrees piles onto an existing answer instead of retyping it. The biggest pile floats to the top, and every answer remembers who said it first.

Once answers pile in, you run the payoff:

• Merge near-duplicates: select two or more answers and tap ⤵ Merge to fold same-idea wordings into one pile. The biggest pile absorbs the others, and no points move yet. Order inside the winning pile is untouched, but students from the folded piles join the payout line behind it, so a merge can cost a small pile's first-sayer their top spot. Merge wordings that really are the same idea, not answers you simply want grouped.
• Tag what's correct: tap ✓ on every answer that counts. Open questions often have several right answers.
• ✓ Reveal & pay: the first student to say a correct answer earns 5 points, each agreer after them one less, with a floor of 1. Being early and right is worth the most, but backing a right answer always pays something.

You can also cancel a poll with the ✕ on the poll card, which closes it with no winner and no points.

Prep questions before class

Open the Projector view and press 📊 Poll. Below the question box, 📋 Prepped questions keeps a list you fire one tap at a time:

• 📗 Sheets template drops a fill-in Google Sheet into your Drive's teachChat folder. The template includes an AI prompt that writes poll questions from your existing slideshow.
• 📥 From Drive loads a poll sheet from your Drive into the list.
• 📁 CSV and the template download are the offline fallback: load questions from a .csv or .txt file on this computer, one per row.

Each row is "question","expected answer", and the second column is optional.

Give a question an expected answer and teachChat shows it mid-poll as a clearly labeled Teacher hint, so the board never sits empty. A hint never earns points; the first real student to back it gets the first-sayer credit.

Shared notes

New classes start with shared notes off. Turn on Shared notes in Setup (under Activities), or from the More menu on the Live tab, and the class gets a live study guide it writes together. A student proposes a line, tags what kind of note it is (key idea, definition, date or event, person, formula or how-to, open question), and the class votes it in. Voting on classmates' notes counts as participation credit, not spendable points.

You stay in charge the whole time. While notes are on, the Shared notes card under Now running on the Live tab has a Manage button (Manage shared notes in the More menu opens the same panel). From there you can Approve a proposal straight into the notes with no vote, or Reject it. You can also add a line directly yourself with Add a note, drag lines to reorder the sheet, and remove anything, even after the vote (points already earned stay). The finished sheet exports from the Records tab as the Shared notes file, a readable web page or a Google Doc.

The note bounty keeps note-taking steady all period. The next approved note pays 3 points base, plus 1 for every 3 minutes the doc sits quiet, capped at 8. The pot resets whenever a student note pays out; your direct adds leave it alone. Each student earns note points for up to 3 approved notes per session, a line already in the notes can't be voted in twice, and a student waits a minute after each proposal before suggesting another.

The vibe check

A one-tap read on the room, styled like sending a sticker: good, ok, confused, or lost. Tapping updates that student's current status, so it's a temperature check, not a poll that piles up.

Only you see the tally. Press Vibe check on the Live tab to turn it on; the button then shows how many have answered, like Vibe check 5/6. Press it again for the tally, New round (zeroes everyone before you ask again), and Turn vibe check off. The same tally sits in a Vibe check card under Now running, with a Clear button. To pin it to the projector, press Show on projector on that card (or in the Vibe check menu), or press 🫡 Vibe check in the projector view. It works even when the projector runs on another device, like a classroom computer, and either place can take it back down. Pressing 🫡 Vibe check on the projector switches it to Mod mode to send the pin, but any projector shows a pinned tally, Mod mode or not. The pin comes off when the session ends. Turning vibe check off takes it off the projector too. The pinned box has its own big 🔄 Reset vibes button, which works before class starts too.

The wording is yours to change. The defaults ship in the register students actually use (💯 Bet, 😐 Mid, 🫠 Lowkey lost, 💀 I'm cooked). In Setup, under Activities, press Change wording next to Vibe check wording (it shows once the vibe check is on) to swap any emoji or label: your class's own slang, a traffic light, whatever fits. Reset defaults brings the originals back anytime.