Mac users can create new polls or insert previously created polls using the PollEV Presenter app that's downloaded Info See the Poll Everywhere Presentation apps site for more information on Apple Keynote and Google Slides. Our Mac PowerPoint app will try to display the correct screen automatically based on the information available but this selection sometimes needs to be overridden. A user can try to force which monitor/display the polls appear on. When you have the PollEv Presenter application open, click “Help” under the menu bar.
If you’re like me, you often give presentations to a class or conference audience and leave wondering things like “Did they get it?” or “What questions were left unanswered?”
My Solution: Incorporate Poll Everywhere into the presentation and know for sure!
Poll Everywhere works with PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides from Windows or Mac computers to add interactive polling to your presentations. Audience members then respond to your questions in real time through a web link or text message during your live presentation and their responses are displayed on the screen as they are received.
Several types of activities can be created using Poll Everywhere including:
- Multiple-choice questions
- Rank order where audience members rank provided options
- Q&A which allows audience members to provide ideas or questions and then upvote or downvote responses
- Clickable images that allow for defined areas within an image and tracking of where audience members click
- Word clouds or open-ended questions that display responses in one of four ways
- Surveys that combine multiple questions into a single set
Once the activity has been created, you can use the PollEv Presenter app on a Mac or the Poll Everywhere PowerPoint add-in on a PC to add the activity as a new slide in your presentation. When running the slide show, the audience is shown the question and the information needed to respond in real time.
With four display options, open-ended questions are one of my favorite ways to encourage audience participation. The responses can be displayed as a Text Wall like a social network news feed, a Word Cloud showing more frequent words larger than others (best for short responses where there may be a lot of duplicate answers), a Cluster where responses are fit within the screen into varying size thought bubbles, or as a Ticker with scrolling responses on the slide.
I used the Cluster format in my TAA conference presentation this past June and the session attendees really enjoyed this interactive feature.
Your turn: Visit www.polleverywhere.com and sign up for your free account to add interactive polling to your next presentation!
Eric Schmieder is the Membership Marketing Manager for TAA. He has taught computer technology concepts to curriculum, continuing education, and corporate training students since 2001. A lifelong learner, teacher, and textbook author, Eric seeks to use technology in ways that improve results in his daily processes and in the lives of those he serves. His latest textbook, Web, Database, and Programming: A foundational approach to data-driven application development using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, MySQL, and PHP, First Edition, is available now through Sentia Publishing.
We use a lot of words and acronyms to help us communicate quicker day-to-day, but it can make it hard for people new to the company to follow. This dictionary will help you get started. If you hear something new, ask somebody what it means and add it. Make sure you only add words that are uniquely Poll Everywhere; everything else you can Google or use a real dictionary to define.
Agave – Poll Everywhere’s app for Microsoft 365 and Agave is Microsoft’s internal name in their Office app store. This is used when a customer is trying to display their poll using their tablet Powerpoint.
Apps (formerly Native) – Apps is a team within Poll Everywhere that works with applications like PowerPoint integration, Windows and Mac, Google Slides, Live Slides and part of the mobile app
Bear Lair or Game room – Themed pairing/phone booth in Suite 500. Used for pair programming, phone calls, and screen shares.
Boring room – Phone booth in Suite 500. Used for phone calls and screen shares.
Bug – Term used when there is an error on a customer-facing feature that used to work. See more details on how we handle bugs here
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – CSS is design language that controls the look and feel of a web page. With CSS, you can control the color of the text, layout designs, background colors, style of text etc.
Chore – Term used in Pivotal Tractor which provide no direct value to the customer and benefits only the company
Cold War room – Themed pairing room in Suite 500
Cookbook – A collection of user testing templates, called Recipes. May be referred to as User Testing Cookbook.
Cookies – Cookies are temporary internet files. A cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on your computer while you are browsing the web.
CS hour – Customer Support Hour. Once a week every Poll Everywhere employee is expected to do at least one hour of customer support. This can be over the phones or email support. This is to help all of our employees understand who our customers are, what they are trying to do, and hopefully identify some things we can change to help our customers succeed.
Das room – Themed pairing room in Suite 500
DMG File (Disk Image) – This is Mac’s OSX disk image files. Once you download the DMG (which contains our Poll Everywhere Presenter App) , you drag the app to the Mac Applications folder. This copies the app from the DMG to applications and then you run the app from Applications.
Epic – An epic is a multi-sprint project that includes people from one or more function.It can last anywhere from two weeks to a few months. Epic team members work closely together to form sprint goals and plan work.
One member of the team will provide a brief update at the daily Standup meeting as well as a more detailed update of future sprint goals at the weekly Scrutineering meeting.
Our usage of the word “epic” corresponds closely to the way Pivotal Tracker uses the term.
Feature story – A feature story provides value to the customer such as a new function
Force monitor – Force Monitor is a term created by Poll Everywhere and only works with Mac. Our Mac PowerPoint app will try to display the correct screen automatically based on the information available but this selection sometimes needs to be overridden. A user can try to force which monitor/display the polls appear on. When you have the PollEv Presenter application open, click “Help” under the menu bar. There will be an option labeled “Force Monitor Selection” and user can play around with the setting to see which settings works best
Aspect Ratio is width vs the height4:3 old school monitor usually a square and is commonly used with a projector16:9 most commonly used with current monitors16:10 size of Macbook Air (the ones CS and most Poll Evian’s use)
When you download slides via the web, the slides are default to 4:3** Since 4:3 is the old standard, we want to make sure the downloaded slide version is universal
FTP – Free text poll. Also known as an Open-ended poll. This allows participants to reply by SMS, Twitter, and the Web with open ended text to a poll question. These are visualized as a text wall (single column of text bubbles), Word Cloud, or Cluster View (group of text bubbles which fill up the whole screen.
Griddle – Griddle is a private GitHub repository that contains a boilerplate Sketch file, co-owned by designers and developers. It contains tokens, elements, components, layouts, and flows. Typically, UI style-guide files are called boilerplates, which we co-opted into Griddle, to match the food-theme of our design process.
Griddle is structured to represent the architecture of our Design System token > element > component > section > page > layout
Growth – Growth is a team within Poll Everywhere. Growth consists of technical engineers who run experiments to make sure things work well
HTS – Human testing suite. This is how we do manual testing. They are large spreadsheets put together by the QA team, PM, and engineering leads to test all of the features of our product. Typically, these are broken up by application, workflow, or epic.
The HTS will be performed initially by the project team for the epic or repo admins to get a solid baseline of quality. Then a meeting is scheduled (by QA, a PM, or engineering lead) to invite the whole company to test the product. This serves to find bugs and raise quality, expose everyone at the company to new features, and get some final feedback and recommendations from people who have never used it before (user testing).
Kintegration Cop – An automated test suite which tests the integration points between our various projects. It sits at the top of our testing pyramid and contains a small number of smoke tests to act as a last line of defense. It runs automatically after any of the relevant projects are deployed to production or staging.
Liveslides – Built by Poll Everywhere which it allows you to embed a web video or any website in a presentation slide.
LMS – Learning Mangement System. It is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting and delivery of electronic educational technology (also called e-learning) courses or training programs.
We have integrations with two leading LMS - Blackboard and Canvas.
MCP – Multiple Choice Poll. This is our bread and butter. Participants (audience members at a presentation, meeting attendees, or students) can respond my SMS, Twitter, and the Web to a multiple choice question. Typically, just A,B,C…. We will visualize these responses as a bar or column chart.
MSI (Microsoft Installer) – Installer package file format used by Windows. MSI files are used for installation, storage, and removal of programs. Using our MSI installation process is the primary troubleshooting step for our Windows PowerPoint App.
OKR – Stands for Objectives, Keys and Results. were adopted from Google as a way to set measurable personal and company goals. We typically set OKRs on a quarterly basis. Each project team and department will have a set of OKRs. These may or may not be supplicated with personal OKRs by individual employees. It’s to help ensure we all have a measurable strategic goal each quarter.
Pair bear – The person you work with to solve a hard problem or write code.
Pair programming (Pairing) – An agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. One, the driver, writes code while the other, the observer or navigator, reviews each line of code as it is typed in. The two programmers switch roles frequently. We try to do this whenever possible and reasonable to do so. Pairing helps prevent bugs and is an excellent platform to learn from each other.
Picnic room – Themed conference room in Suite 510
Pivotal Tracker – Project management system we use to manage and prioritize projects
Poll Evian – What we call ourselves once you work at Poll Everywhere!
Pro Presenter – Pro Presenter is a presentation software that we see mostly used by religious organizations. It’s good for a variety of uses such as slides, karaoke, videos, and it all comes with lots of sound mixing options (which is apparently part of the big draw). Poll Everywhere is not compatible with but a workaround is that the organization can try presenting from the web using pro presenter’s webpage widget. However it’s not native or seamless to use.
Proxy – Proxies are common with companies worried about security (ie universities, K-12 schools, medical hospitals, prescription companies. Companies have a different process to keep internal network safe. A Proxy server is a computer that acts as a gateway between a local network (ie all the computers at one company in one building) and a larger-scale networks such as the internet. You may hear about these whenever we talk about our PowerPoint App for Windows PCs.
Q&A – Q&A polls or Upvote/Downvote polls. Participants to submit an open-ended response via the web AND then anyone in the audience may vote up/down these responses. It’s our attempt of a live reddit forum during a presentation and is very cool.
Rainforest – An automated human testing service for regression testing, and sanity check testings for site-wide changes. Tests can be scheduled at any hour of the day. The process and results are provided as screenshots (>= IE11, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox are supported).
Recipe – A template for writing, interpreting and socializing user tests. Part of a collection called Cookbook.
Retro – Every Wednesday before our company-wide Town Hall, there is 5 minute Q&A poll where everyone in the company has a chance to anonymously submit a comment, question or concern
Seagulling – A term we use to describe someone who has not been involved in a project at all who swoops in just before release and suggests many changes. It’s the responsibility of the PM and lead designer for the project to ensure this doesn’t happen.
Skittles – Our deer head mascot
Shortcode – Term used for our 5 digit number that customers can send SMS for Open-Ended and Multiple Choice polls.
Swill – Term we used for coffee made from a regular coffee maker vs pour-over coffee
Pollev Presenter App Mac Pro
ST6 – Stands for Steel Team 6 and is a team within Poll Everywhere. ST6 is our “sniper” team. They work on smaller features with a lot of impact (ex. Change the workflow to invite new users). They will also do engineering work to help our enterprise level customers succeed. Finally, it acts as a cooldown period for engineers coming off a large project before beginning the next.
Pollev.com
Town Hall – We have a weekly Town Hall every Wednesday where the entire company meets to share what team has been working on
Viz – Visualization. This is what we call our live chart visualization and the Github repository for it. All of our poll types have a visualization.
VPAT – Stands for Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. VPAT is information on how a vendor’s product or service claims to conform to the Section 508. 508 compliance (in a nutshell) means that all users, regardless of disability status, can access technology. It’s a way to break down barriers and provide new opportunities for all Internet users.
VPN – Stands for Virtual Private Network and is a method to add security and privacy to private and public networks (Wifi Hotspots and the Internet). VPN enables to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. VPNs are most often used by corporations to protect sensitive data. VPNs may allow employees to securely access a corporate intranet while located outside the office.