Category Archives: Customer Stories

The Coca Cola Super Bowl Poll Blackout

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During the Super Bowl, Coca Cola ran a campaign at cokechase.com where people could vote on the ending of their commercial. Unfortunately, when the page was loaded, it looked like this:

Coke Chase

The Coke Chase website appeared as a blank desert for many people during the Super Bowl because of technical difficulties.

Live events at this scale are really tough. We’ve done our fair share of big live events, like the Man vs Food Super Bowl special, as well as hundreds of high stakes corporate events, and got through these with the following design philosophy:

  1. Design for failure
  2. Minimize the number of moving parts on the server
  3. Cache aggressively
  4. Queue aggressively

Design for failure

“Assume the worst and hope for the best” is a great strategy for handling spikes for huge events, especially the Super Bowl.

The worst case scenario we design for at Poll Everywhere is that the user’s Internet connection completely dies. As you can imagine, this is a very extreme event since web applications need Internet connections to work, but we handle this anyway. This may happen if they’re on an unreliable cellphone network or if something terrible happened to our servers and they went down.

Poll Everywhere displays a message to users when there are difficulties connecting to the server. In this particular case, I killed the WiFi on the test device.

When the connection comes back, we inform the user that they can continue using the application.

A notification is displayed when the users Internet connection is back.

A notification is displayed when the users Internet connection is back.

These notifications keep the user in the know so that they can start figuring out if something is wrong with their Internet connection and take steps to correct it.

We look at all pieces of our application this way, and when all of that fails, we give our users the heads up at status.polleverywhere.com that something bad is happening.

Minimize the number of moving parts on the server

The best way to scale an application is to have it do very little work so that it can handle more requests. Our current application development strategy at Poll Everywhere is to shift all the work that needs to be done for a web page from the server to the users web browser. Our mobile application at PollEv.com has zero moving parts and consists of just three HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. The only thing our server has to do is serve up these three files and it’s done. We shift even more load off of our servers by using a Content Distribution Network to handle the delivery of these files, which results in a faster, more reliable experience for our customers.

Cache aggressively

When you request a web page, the browser has to connect to a server far far away through the Interwebs and download the content to your computer for display. If the server is configured properly, it can tell the browser, “Hey, the files you downloaded are valid for the next 30 years.” The next time the browser requests this page, it checks for a copy on your computer and uses that if it’s valid.

Why is this so important? Well, if the server goes down because of an insanely high volume of traffic, people tend to refresh their browsers to “fix” the problem. These refreshes trigger a request to the server which creates even more load and compounds the problem. Things can get out of hand pretty quickly. If the user downloads these files to their cache and then refreshes the page, a substantial amount of load can be taken off of the servers.

Imagine if every time you got hungry at home you had to drive to the grocery store to pick up whatever food you desired. Three trips per day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? That’s crazy! Fortunately we have refrigerators, which can be thought of as a food cache.

A fridge is a cache for food.

A fridge is a cache for food. Instead of visiting the grocery store each time you’re hungry, you go to the fridge and grab a bite to eat. When the store is a mad-house on Sunday evenings, you can keep eating from the food cache and avoid the crowds.

When you’re hungry in front of the television you can walk to the fridge, eat some food, and sit back down in a few minutes. When the fridge runs low or the food spoils, you jump in the car, fill up a cart, and bring it home. This trip might take an hour on a good day or a few hours when the grocery store is a mad house, but you replenish the food cache and make trips from the television to the fridge take a fraction of the time of a full-blown trip to the store.

Queue responses aggressively

So far we’ve put a bunch of strategies in place to deal with users requesting the web page where vote is cast, but what about handling huge volumes of incoming votes?

Its a lot like the real world actually. Imagine if a Super Bowl poll was written on a chalkboard that had a column per poll option. For people to vote, they have to walk by and check their choice under the column. If 100,000 people stormed the chalk board at the same time to mark their response, it would be total chaos.

Computer systems can become overloaded when a bunch of people use it at the same time without any sort of queueing.

The trick is to make people stand in a single file line and check the option they’d like as they walk by in an orderly fashion and things can be kept under control.

When a queue is put into place, people stand in line and a particular task is accomplished one person at a time. While lines can be slow, at least when it’s finally your turn, the goal can be accomplished. In a stampede situation, you may never accomplish your goal trying to break through the crowds.

A line with 100,000 people? That seems daunting! You bet it is, but if each person takes a few milliseconds to mark their response, the entire queue can be processed in a few minutes. Split the single chalkboard into one chalkboard per poll option, and you can split the line for faster, parallel processing.

We aggressively employ queueing to make sure that we quickly receive responses from our users, then they stand in line on our server for a few milliseconds, before being processed.

Scaling requires years of experience in operations and understanding in a particular problem domain

On the surface, polling applications seem very simple, but the devil is in the details, especially for large events like the Super Bowl. There are a lot of other very interesting design issues that I didn’t cover above that we employ to make sure that we can scale for large events, but the techniques and approaches above will get you pretty far.

Of course, Poll Everywhere is here for you if you have a big event that you want to host without sweating the details.

Strategic Planning With Large Groups Using Poll Everywhere

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When we come across interesting uses of Poll Everywhere, we like to share them with you. Today’s guest blogger is Jason Gershowitz of RESOLVE, a thirty year old organization that specializes in creating long lasting collaborative relationships in a variety of businesses, NGOs, governments, and communities across a diverse array of sectors.

The Neighbor Dialogue: Engaging 400 Participants in a Meaningful Way For Strategic Planning

How do nearly 400 participants meaningfully contribute to one strategic plan? Not all participants are decision makers, so how can decision makers effectively leverage the experience and ideas of a large group?

Sure, there are a variety of tools that come to mind: individual interviews, surveys, small group discussions, voting, etc. Participation, however, is most valuable when: 1) participants feel their contributions have been heard; and 2) participant contributions actually inform the decision makers. Many established tools don’t always do this.

As RESOLVE’s Collaborative Technology Program Coordinator, it is my job to identify opportunities to enhance decision-making processes using collaborative technology. We don’t come at situations with a one-tool-fits-all approach, but rather a one-approach-fits-all “tool.” Technology is designed for general interactions, and we specialize in evaluating an interaction to select and tailor a technology and engagement process for a specific outcome.

In a 400-participant town hall-style strategic planning process, we tailored Poll Everywhere (PE) to create a Neighbor Dialogue™ – gathering feedback from the large group, providing a space for discussion, and prioritizing that feedback for decision makers. PE allowed each participant to share their sense of the biggest organizational strengths.

  1. Using a pre-designed process and Poll Everywhere’s easy “export to word cloud” feature we shared the feedback with the group visually while we crunched statistics.
  2. As our facilitation team explained the word cloud results and participants digested the feedback from their fellow respondents, we prepared the next poll, which included the ten most commonly mentioned strengths from the previous poll. Participants used the second poll to select their top strength from the list.
  3. Through this iterative method, we were able to identify the large group’s vision of their organization’s top three strengths and then use this input to drive the facilitated discussion forward.

The meeting was very successful, identifying focus areas for subsequent discussions and generating buy-in from the larger community in the strategic planning process. Poll Everywhere enabled our team to collect feedback from 400 people, funnel feedback into priorities, and gather specific ideas about those priorities, while compressing the process into a two-hour high-energy meeting. These participants moved from “being informed” to “informing the process” – or taking part in meaningful engagement.

To learn more about our Technology Assessment approach, check out our Integrating Collaborative Technology Webinar Training Series.

Formative Assessment in the Flipped Classroom

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Flipped Classroom Assessment

Flipped Classroom techniques and technology are some of the hottest topics in education. Here’s a great EDUCAUSE article on the topic if you’d like to learn more.

The most essential aspect to a successful flipped classroom is effective time management. When you’re devoting precious class time to in-class exercises and concept engagement, knowing exactly what to focus on makes a world of difference. That’s where Poll Everywhere comes in.

Poll Everywhere allows you to assess student comprehension BEFORE class the next day by having students respond to questions from home, while reviewing lecture material. Although often used primarily in “real-time,” the system also works great remotely, whether you’re slipping a poll into a take home video lecture or written instructions. And since students can respond via the web or by Text message, you don’t have to worry about them always being by a computer.  This is something no clicker can do.

Dr. Matt Stoltzfus of Ohio State has been employing a flipped classroom model for over six years in a variety of teaching environments. He uses Poll Everywhere to quiz students and reward them for “showing up prepared.” This helps him identify which concepts to revisit and spend the most time on and identify students who may need individual assistance. More information on Dr. Stoltzfus’ approach can be found in The ‘Flipped’ Classroom article he co-authored for the American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Education Committee on Computers in Chemical Education. You can follow him on Twitter as @Dr_Fus.

Have you experimented with flipping the classroom? Have you worked in any assessment questions? What worked and what didn’t?

 

3-2-1 Assessment: A Common Core Method for Assessment

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Roger Colby authored the following post. The post was originally published on Roger’s blog, Writing Is Hard Work on October 10th, 2012.

321 Wordle

One of the things that we try to steer away from when teaching using the common core method is to get away from wrote memorization, teachers answering questions for students and basic surface learning.

Assessment, or testing, usually takes the form (in my class) of an essay or a multiple choice exam.  I decided to try something to help students review for a test but at the same time provide instant feedback from students as to their understanding of the material.

3-2-1 Assessment: (after discussing a topic or subject)

1.  On separate sticky notes, each student writes (1) one question they still have, (2) two things they do not understand and (3) three things they have learned.

2.  When finished, students affix the sticky notes to a bulletin board, poster or piece of chart paper divided into three columns labeled “3″, “2″ and “1″.

3.  Student’s notes can then be reviewed to construct a picture of a classes understanding and identify areas of reteaching.

This method takes moments and it gives the teacher near instant feedback as to student understanding.

Another way you can use this, if your school allows the use of cell phones for classroom work (and if they haven’t, you are in a museum and you are the curator of the museum), is to set up an internet poll where students can text their answers and then watch the bars raise or lower.

The best internet polling site that is totally free is www.polleverywhere.com.  All you have to do is create a free poll using their easy to use instructions.  Ask a question such as how well did you understand (insert random concept here)?  Give them three answers such as “fully understand”, “understand somewhat” and “totally don’t get it.”  Your students then text a number to another number on the screen and get an instant poll result.

Try this once and you will not go back to the old way of doing things.  It is loads of fun and makes your students feel like their voices are being heard.

Professor John Boyer AKA ‘The Plaid Avenger’ on Poll Everywhere

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Last week we posted about using Skype In The Classroom to expand teaching beyond the walls of the class. Today, we’d like to introduce you to John Boyer of Virginia Tech. Skype is one of the many tools Professor Boyer uses to teach a class of nearly 3,000 students! In fact last December Boyer sent a YouTube video request for a Skype interview to Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Nobel Peace Prize recipient graciously accepted! In addition to Skype, Boyer employs tools like uStream, Twitter, Facebook, Turntable, podcasts, his own graphic novels, and (you guessed it) Poll Everywhere to encourage teacher-student and student-student interaction in and out of class. John sat down to share his experiences with Poll Everywhere and his “mega-class,” World Regions above. 

If you’d like to learn more about Professor Boyer’s experiences “supersizing the classroom,” check out his SXSW talk here or this excellent Chronicle of Higher Education article.

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If you have a hankering to learn more about the world’s issue and problems check out www.plaidavenger.com; where you can learn about world events from Professor Boyer’s alter-ego and comic book character, The Plaid Avenger.

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Got your own Poll Everywhere story? Let us know! Email hello+story@polleverywhere.com

‘Sex and Dating’ – Encouraging Feedback With Poll Everywhere

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Cam BrennanThe following is a guest post by Cam Brennan. Cam is the Youth Pastor at Fellowship Bible Church in Kansas and author of the blog aNewGravity.

Sunday night, the 26th of February, we had our first ever Q&A panel on ‘Sex and Dating’ for the students in the youth group at our church, Fellowship Bible Church. The panel consisted of 8 adults, ranging in age from 23-49, some married and some not. These 8 adults are part of the team of sponsors that help run our youth group every week of the year.

In order to encourage the participation of our students in the Q&A session we used Poll Everywhere to create an anonymous poll, allowing the students to text their questions in. This accomplished a few things for us:

  1. Upheld the anonymity we knew would encourage our students to ask deeper, more personal questions,
  2. Encouraged the students to really pay attention to what the sponsors were saying because they were directly answering the student’s questions,
  3. Allowed sponsors to focus on the question itself and not who asked the question,
  4. Allowed students to directly participate via their phones, which was great because students always love ‘cool’ ways to do things,
  5. Allowed me to moderate the questions and weed out any questions that were either glaringly inappropriate or off topic (of which we received just a few).

Our students asked questions ranging from advice on when to break up to wondering what to do if you’ve already had sex. We had questions about making out and boundaries along with questions about marriage and if it is boring. You can find a majority of the questions that were asked here, along with the answers given.

We had nearly 30 students participate Sunday night and based on the questions they asked it is clear that being sexually active is not only a temptation for them but is something they are feeling the pressure of.

Going into the night I had no idea what to expect. I was unsure if the students would participate and I was unsure, if they did participate, what sorts of questions they would ask.  There was a lot up in the air as we started, but by the end of the night I was more than pleased with how it went. Using Poll Everywhere was a great way to encourage our students to ask the questions they really wanted to ask, without having to raise their hand and ask it in front of everyone else. I’m convinced that had we done it ‘the old fashioned way’ the night would have been a flop.  We had a great time and we will definitely do more nights like this in the future.

The Modern Middle East: Using Poll Everywhere in a History Survey Course

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The following is a guest post by Sarah Shields. Professor Shields teaches history at UNC concentrating on “The Modern Middle East.” She shares her ongoing experiences with teaching a large survey course on her blog, Teaching the Modern Middle East.

 

 

I had been on research leave for months, but I still couldn’t stop thinking about how to conduct a big lecture class in a way that was consistent with my teaching philosophy.  A colleague told me about clickers; and I was intrigued with the idea of using a classroom response system, but I couldn’t figure out how it would fit into a history course. What kinds of questions could I ask?

Over the years, I have come to question the large lecture course as a way to teach the skills we want history students to acquire. We can tell them things, show them how to explain what happened in the past and why it matters, but the very act of lecturing seems antithetical to teaching critical thinking and analytical skills.  The best we can do is show them how we, the historians, arrived at our conclusions.   Science educators concluded long ago that students only learn science when they actually do science. I wanted to give students an opportunity to struggle with the kinds of issues historians face, to engage them in the process of figuring out how to decide which sources we rely on and which narratives we emphasize.

After talking with UNC’s Center for Faculty Excellence, I decided to try Poll Everywhere. Although I knew that it could not create a whole new kind of critical learning structure, I hoped it could keep students engaged and help them think about the big questions–instead of just learning the desired answers.

As I have progressed through the semester, I have discovered ways I can use this technology to give students more of a voice in the classroom.  Here’s what I’m doing:

Each lecture, I use Poll Everywhere at least twice:

  • At the beginning I take attendance (their phones are registered) by asking the students to respond to a multiple choice trivia-style question about the Middle East
  • At the end I post a slide for the students to text their questions.  I have been getting more questions–and more complex questions–this semester than ever before, often questions that anticipate the next lecture.

As I rethink my old lectures, I have tried to focus more on big issues than on narrating events:

  • I often ask students to consider options or alternative ways historical actors might have dealt with things in the past; e.g. how could the Great Powers have reconciled their colonial interests in the Middle East with their promises of self-government? This allows the students to contemplate the options as they would have appeared in 1918, and to bring the things they learned earlier about the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, and the Great Powers to bear on the “current” problem.
  • Sometimes, I ask students to talk with each other in pairs or small groups, then text their responses to Poll Everywhere.  The students seem fascinated with reading each others’ responses, gaining a sense of alternative possibilities and having an opportunity to consider new ideas.  
  • When I post student responses on my blog, I use wordle. In one question, I asked my students to figure out how Great Britain could reconcile two apparently conflicting promises contained in their mandate for Palestine after World War I: Arab self-government and a national home for the Jews.  Their responses:

Word_cloud

Other Findings

  • Students’ participation through Poll Everywhere has also emboldened them to speak out without using the technology–though volunteering to speak in front of more than 200 students remains a daunting prospect for many.
  • The success of Poll Everywhere in my classroom has encouraged me to seek out other technologies to enhance engagement and learning for my students.
  • The new technology has not created the equivalent of a lab for history students, but it is making my students engage more actively with the problems of historical interpretation, analytical reasoning, and the critical analysis of sources.

 

I welcome suggestions for other ways I might use this technology in history courses.

 

 

Some Practical Applications from Educators

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The end of the year gives us a chance to recap a year of innovation, as well as recharge for a strong, six-month push to the end of school year. Whether a teacher, parent, or student, check out some tech education issues, catch up on educators in the classroom, or add to your digital backpack with some tech tools!

Sample Poll from Article
The blog post, Musing Mathematically gives a great example of content-area-specific uses for Poll Everywhere : “What is the slope of a line passing through (-6,6) and (-4,0)?”  When the focus of a professional development meeting switched to SMS text message polling, this math teacher explored the Poll Everywhere site and quickly found the ease with which polls are created. Best of all, this post outlines “Five Benefits” derived from using Poll Everywhere in the math class that can easily be translated to any subject area.

Economics textbook
The ideas continue with Musings about Teaching Economic.  An Economics teacher suggests Poll Everywhere as a backchannel using the sites open-ended format.  An instructor prompts students to submit questions or comments during a lecture, which can be included in the lesson either in real time or when the instructor chooses.   A backchannel also provides an opportunity for student-to-student discussions, all occurring before their eyes.  It provides the ability to interact with all students texting in or provide a collective experience for distance learning.  This is a great suggestion that can help a teacher get a sense of how well students are understanding a lesson.

Interested?  Watch this demo on creating a poll and receiving results.  This video goes beyond the free version that many teachers currently use; so if you’ve ever wondered what a paid plan would include, then check this out.  From registering participants for assessment purposes to creating spreadsheets for data comparison over a period of time, this video can give you that info.

Fairfax Times
 A teacher in Virginia made the news in the Fairfax Times! Frank Franz of Madison High School posed a question of the day to begin his class and had his students respond by texting responses via their cell phones.   Using Poll Everywhere, Mr. Franz displayed his question and the entire class watched as responses were displayed on the screen in front of them.  His motivation is about “Attracting students’ attention and getting them to focus early in the class,” and students have responded positively through engagement and connection with his lessons.

Mr. Franz wasn’t the only tech savvy teacher featured in the Fairfax Times, two Hayfield Secondary School teachers, Ken Halla and Deirdre Forgione, are using blogs to connect with students.  Mr. Halla has increased his students’ engagement by incorporating blogs on history and government in his lessons.  Ms. Forgione uses blogs and Twitter to display and promote her students’ artwork to others.

Technology is a tool that teachers can use to capture the interests of students. Once interested, technology can be used to transform passive students to active students that are taking responsibility for their learning through the analysis, manipulation, and presentation of their skills.

 

Transforming Elementary Education: an evening with Sir Ken Robinson (and Poll Everywhere)

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Event_header

Educators throughout the Los Angeles area were treated to an evening with internationally renowned author, speaker, and leader in the field of education, Sir Ken Robinson. In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson spoke at a TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference that is considered one of the most-watched videos on TED with over 8 million views, and his thought-provoking discourse on the way we educate children has been described as visionary. On November 4, 2001, over 700 educators from more than 100 schools were inspired by his ideas on the betterment of education.

The event held by the Center for the Future of Elementary Education (CFEE) at Curtis School was dubbed a resounding success as noted by the flourish of compliments received by their Poll Everywhere Response Wall.  This Response Wall was featured prominently at the event on a 17′ projection screen both before formal remarks and during the Town Hall session.  Still collecting responses, the Response Wall has been embedded on the cfee site.  Poll Everywhere worked closely with organizer Christopher Thinnes, Head of Upper Elementary School & Academic Dean, Curtis School, to develop a plan that fit their needs.

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Congratulations to the organizers of this event and for continuing to promote and advance the future of education.

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Touchdown, Saints!

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Poll Everywhere was in the middle of one heavy-duty decision, Saints or Cowboys?  This is one, very cool use of Poll Everywhere by Fox 33 in LA.  The station’s market covers four states and two NFL teams, and they gave its viewers a voice.  Using either keywords “Saints” or “Cowboys” viewers were able to decide what game they would be watching for Week 6 of the NFL season.


The people of Shreveport have voted and 19,977 votes later, Fox 33 will be showing the Saints @ Tampa Bay.   Grab your black and gold and sit back, here come the Saints!