📊 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

Press 📊 Poll on the overlay (or in the teacher console), type anything you'd ask out loud, and 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. Everyone keeps their spot in line, and no points move yet.
• 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, which closes it with no winner and no points.

Prep questions before class

The Poll panel keeps a prepped 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 quietly plants it mid-poll as an answer under a made-up student name, so the board never sits empty. The plant never earns points; the first real student to back it gets the first-sayer credit.

Shared notes

Turn on class notes and voting in the teacher console 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. From your queue you can approve a proposal straight into the notes with no vote, or reject it. You can also add a line directly yourself, drag lines to reorder the sheet, and remove anything, even after the vote (points already earned stay). The finished sheet exports as a Markdown file.

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 lands; your direct adds leave it alone.

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. It lives in the teacher console with a responded count, and the 🫡 Vibe check button on the overlay pins it to the projector; since the tally is teacher-only, pinning it switches the overlay into Mod mode. Press 🔄 Clear vibe check in the console (the overlay's copy of the button says 🔄 Reset vibes) to zero the tally before you ask again.

The wording is yours to change. The defaults ship in the register students actually use (💯 Bet, 😐 Mid, 🫠 Lowkey lost, 💀 I'm cooked), and ✏️ Customize the wording lets you swap any emoji or label: your class's own slang, a traffic light, whatever fits. Reset defaults brings the originals back anytime.