PollEverywhere
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Friday Favorite: PollEverywhere Mac Presenter grows up
When your job (or schoolwork) involves giving presentations to rooms full of more-or-less interested parties, you know how hard it can be to maintain a constructive level of audience attention. The economical cloud audience response system (ARS) provided by the mad scientists at PollEverywhere is a great way to spice up a session with quick, engaging multiple choice and full-text questions. PollEverywhere's polls display wonderfully on the web (if you've got the Flash player) and do well in Windows versions of PowerPoint, where the appropriate ActiveX control to embed the remote Flash animation is available. For Mac presentation apps, however, the path is not so smooth. Prior versions of the company's Mac Presenter app used a QuickTime workaround to display polls, but it was somewhat clunky and did not automatically cue up when the polling slide appeared on screen. Time for an improved approach. With the December 2011 release of the all-new Mac Presenter application, the polling experience is now hands-free and incredibly simple. The Mac Presenter app connects to your PollEverywhere hosted account and lets you embed polling references into Keynote or PowerPoint slides with a single click -- the poll identifiers end up as a block of XML code in the slide notes, so you can easily move polling slides from deck to deck. The rest is easy: you just draw a solid color box on your slide where you want the poll to show up. Like magic, when you present that slide, the Mac Presenter app will scale the poll display to cover just that placeholder box. True, it's a smidge more effort than the Windows PowerPoint configuration, but it's definitely worth it. PollEverywhere offers a free plan that allows up to 40 responses per poll, and business pricing for higher service levels starts at $15 per month. K-12 and higher-ed discounts are also available. Do you have a favorite Mac app, peripheral/accessory, cloud service or iOS app that you think deserves to be featured as a Friday Favorite? Be sure to let us know.
Integrate SMS polling into Keynote with Poll Everywhere
There's market prominence, and then there's sheer ubiquity. Even though it's been called a drain on our nation's military prowess, in the business world, you really can't get away from PowerPoint. Microsoft's presentation station within Office is a core participant in meetings large and small, and there's an enormous ecosystem of add-ons, plug-ins, and collaborative apps that extend the basic product. Most of these enhancements are Windows-only affairs, and some of them are downright useful (I'm thinking of Articulate Studio in particular, which would be plain awesome on the Mac). If you want to do audience response measurement within a meeting, for instance -- letting attendees vote or answer questions on the fly -- you're pretty much locked in to displaying those results within PowerPoint. There's hope on the horizon for Keynote, though. The SMS-centric Poll Everywhere service, which allows an audience to quickly answer questions using their cellphones, has introduced beta support for Keynote and PowerPoint 2008 that gracefully displays the response percentages on multiple choice questions. You can try it out yourself with a free Poll Everywhere account; the unpaid plan allows you to collect up to 30 answers per poll, while paid plans go way higher. The tool requires Snow Leopard and Keynote '09 to work. Instead of the embedded Flash SWF playback widget that Poll Everywhere uses to display results in PowerPoint 2003/07/10 on Windows, the Mac approach leverages a helper app and on-demand downloads of QuickTime movies to handle the answers. It's pretty sneaky, and pretty effective. If you need to collect feedback from a roomful of drowsy colleagues, try out these tools and see if things get spiced up a bit.
