If you’re on some of our paid plans you get to choose your keywords. It’s common to use some acronym (perhaps your company, group, or conference initials) for keywords, followed by numbers.

Let’s say you are interested in other people’s business. Let’s say you work as part of the National Society Affirming, “Privacy Rights Is So Mundane”. You might want to make a poll like this:

In the past you had to type in each keyword separately. We had someone call last week who needed 300 choices on a single poll (and believe it or not, this happens frequently). Data entry is no fun. So now, if you set the first keyword to be letters followed by a number, and the rest of your keywords are just auto-keywords, we’ll just auto-number the rest for you following your pattern.

HOPE1 -> HOPE1, HOPE2, HOPE3, HOPE4, etc
MPIWEC1 -> MPIWEC1, MPIWEC2, MPIWEC3, etc
P200 -> P200, P201, P202, etc

It’s a very simple feature, but a great time-saver.

The post Auto-number Custom Keywords appeared first on Poll Everywhere's Blog.

Hey, baby. I know I promised you I could change. You longed for better reliability in PowerPoint. You yearned for classy full screen navigation between polls. You pined for customizable fonts. You jealously said, “Why can’t your tablets and phones show polls exactly the way my desktop browsers do?”

And you secretly experienced a wanton lust for faster loading.

Or maybe you don’t think of software that way.

No matter. We heard you saying it that way anyway.

On September 1st, we will switch all users to HTML5. You can switch now and get ahead of the game. If you do, you’ll also be able to:

• Switch between polls in fullscreen mode (hey pros: no more cuts from the A/V switch just to switch polls!)
• Select beautiful fonts like Tisa, Proxima Nova, and Netto
• Insanely fast loading (check it out – the slowpoke on the left is flash)
• Insert your polls in PowerPoint slides without leaving PowerPoint. Our PollEv toolbar lets you skip the download-copy-paste shuffle.

New Fonts!

Windows PowerPoint Plugin

Our relationship with Adobe Flash had been on the rocks for quite some time. Flash would sometimes hang your PowerPoint charts. Our charts had become cantankerous and adding features was painful. Flash was kind of a violent drunk. That’s why we’re cutting Flash out of the picture.

So what do you have to do to enjoy the romance of HTML5…

• If you’re presenting your polls from the web, enable HTML5 from your My Polls page and go to town!

• If you present your polls in Windows PowerPoint… we have something special for you. HTML5 is the cat’s meow. To use it, you have to download the new PollEv Presenter. It’s a few clicks of effort upfront, but the stability, beauty, and sheer joy of never having to leave PowerPoint to insert your polls more than makes up for it.

• Don’t worry, Mac users, we haven’t forgotten you. Big enhancements for the PollEv Presenter for Mac are coming soon. In the meantime, there’s no app update required. If you enable HTML5 on your My Polls page the PollEv Presenter for Mac will automatically ditch Flash with a jump, heel click, and smile. HTML5 gets along much better with Apple stuff than Flash does. (Thank you, Steve Jobs.)

Let us know what you think in the comments below or drop us a line at hello@polleverywhere.com. We always fight over who gets to open your mail first.

Smooches,

The growing Poll Ev Team  

The post Introducing HTML5 charts, the PowerPoint plug-in, and users talking dirty to us appeared first on Poll Everywhere's Blog.

What do I do with free text polling?

(To catch everyone up: Free Text Polling is a polling style that allows for open response)

An example of a Free Text Poll.

So here are some ideas and tips, gleaned both from actual stories from our customers, as well as our own crazy imaginations.

Note: we use the word audience here to describe the people viewing a poll, but classrooms are equally applicable for these ideas. So teachers and professors, these are for you too!

1. Find out more from your audience

You learned this in high school:  asking open ended questions yields better insight.  Here are some examples of questions you can ask:

• WHY do you like this conference?
• WHAT questions do you want me to address?
• WHERE should we go for lunch?
• WHO should shave their head for this year’s sales challenge?
• WHEN is the best time to have this meeting?

2. Use Word Clouds For Extra Impact!

Take your audience’s responses to free text polls…

…and make fascinating word clouds!

3.  Hear your audience’s questions before the end

Every presentation usually ends with “any questions?”  Well, why wait until the end?  Let your audience ask questions during your presentation. If they’re registered you can follow up one on one with them, or ask anonymously for difficult subjects like management feedback, ethics discussion, sex education, or people’s opinions about current events.

If you’d rather not have your audience tweeting to the whole world about what they’re seeing, a live text wall helps everyone see everyone’s comments during your talk. Warning:  this is highly engaging! (Use our moderation feature if you’re worried about a joker in the back of the room). Try some of the following approaches:

• Show the questions during the presentation
• Show the questions at the end, then try Discourses, currently in Beta, and have your audience VOTE on which questions they want answered.
• Download the questions afterwards privately.

4. Brainstorm more effectively

Some people are too shy to contribute to brainstorming sessions. Others are uncomfortable verbalizing in a second language, large groups or unfamiliar settings. Still others would rather not know who came up with the controversial idea.

Anonymous free text walls enable everyone to contribute, not just the folks who talk the most.  You never know where the next incredible concept will come from. Use moderation if you want to decide what options to show to the group. Try Discourses, currently in Beta, and have your team vote on the ideas they like best.

5.  Involve more people in strategic planning

Open up the process of Strategic Planning to your entire organization. Yes, 400 people or more can do strategic planning together. Get buy in BEFORE you launch your next plan.

6.  Make your employees happier

Employees always have questions and feedback. Make it easy for them to anonymously ask what’s really on their mind using open ended polls.  Here’s how.

Bonus:  Teach Shakespeare, Creative Writing, or Storytelling

An enterprising teacher found a clever way to engage her students about iambic pentameter.

How do you use Free Text Polls?  Share your ideas with everyone in the comments!

The post Six Ideas For Free Text Polls appeared first on Poll Everywhere's Blog.

Last week, we discussed the possibility of making slides more memorable by using the forbidden element in PowerPoint: text. We promised a quiz too. Without looking at the previous article, use the comments section below to share with us what content you remember from it. 

This week, we address the point of where in a deck to place your most important information for maximum retention.

You may have heard of the primacy and recency effects, according to which people tend to remember items from the beginning and ending of a list a lot more than items in the middle of a list (depending on the presence of a distracter task, the speed of the presentation, and the list length). These observations are typically linked to short-term memory recall tests.

Figure 1. Items at the beginning and ending of a list tend to be more memorable in short-term memory tests

When long-term memory is concerned, and given a longer list length (conditions that describe the present study), researchers have observed that people make a fixed number of searches for items in the long-term store, and the probability of retrieving a particular item is lower when there are more items. This observation matches the findings in our study, where the first slide in all 26 conditions did not receive a high recall rate (in both shuffled and non-shuffled decks). The deck in our study contained 20 slides, and memory was tested after 48 hours; by contrast, most tests on primacy and recency effects contain approximately 10 items and memory is tested immediately after viewing the list.

In more recent studies, some researchers have found significant serial positioning when analyzing the recall rate of commercials broadcast during the Super Bowl. They discovered that commercials presented during the first batch of ads were remembered significantly better than commercials displayed in the middle or at the end of the program. Since alcohol and tedium that may occur during a football game are likely to interfere with a study, other researchers replicated the research in lab conditions, and asked students to view 15 commercials. In a long-term test, they observed that the primacy effect held strong, while the recency effect faded.

Figure 2. Primacy effect may be stronger in long-term memory, so consider placing more effort in the design of the introductory slides

Reflecting on serial positioning effects, several researchers have proposed various explanations for the primacy and recency effects. They remarked that the first and last items in a list might be recalled better because, when analyzed globally, the beginning and ending are more distinct; their sheer positioning attracts more attention. Viewers may pay less and less attention to each item as the list progresses, thus creating a primacy effect.

This gradient model of attention could be applied to explain some of the findings in our research study: people tended to remember slides from the first half of the presentation (i.e., 6, 7, 8, and 9), and memory faded towards the end. The practical guideline derived from these observations is to consider placing the most important parts of a presentation in the first half of an on-demand PowerPoint file. If you have other content elements that need to be remembered but they are placed towards the end of the deck, it means that more design effort needs to be placed at the end of the deck.

More about how this can be accomplished next week.

The post Better PowerPoint: Does Sequence Matter? appeared first on Poll Everywhere's Blog.

In our never ending quest to make presentations better, we’ve invited Dr. Carmen Simon(formerly Taran) to guest author a new series on Better PowerPoint.  Dr. Simon is a cognitive scientist, a leader in the virtual presentation movement, and an internationally renowned public speaker. Dr. Simon is a founder of Rexi Media, a world wide presentation consulting firm. This is part two in a series based on her research published this year. Part One can be found here. 

Part Two: Can you control what people remember from a PowerPoint presentation?

Last week, I mentioned the study on how much people remembered from an on-demand PowerPoint presentation of 20 slides after 48 hours. The answer: 4 slides. One of the remaining questions: can we control which slides? The study results showed that approximately 1,500 people remembered slides according to a pattern.

Here is the content included in the slides that people remembered more frequently:

• Slide 6: Don’t wear stripes because they dance around on the screen and are distracting. If you wear anything distracting in a webcast, people will remember that and nothing you say.
• Slide 7: Don’t wear white. It glows and it becomes the most noticeable thing on the video screen.
• Slide 8: Pastel shirts work well on video.
• Slide 9: Don’t wear black, it is too harsh and can suck up all the light.

The purpose of this week’s article is to show you how we can influence what people remember. Use these characteristics next time you create a PowerPoint presentation.

Concrete Visual Language. Participants in the study tended to remember the same slides even though those slides did not contain pictures. This may be because the text was highly visual, in the sense that it generated mental pictures (e.g., don’t wear white, black or stripes). This observation matches research from advertising, according to which high-imagery words are remembered a lot better than low-imagery or abstract words.¹ This is great news because many presenters complain that they do not have time or money to find and purchase expensive images for all slides in their decks. If you have highly visual language, you can save on other resources.

Visual language is typically concrete language. In general, concrete words are easier to remember than abstract words because concrete labels can be encoded in two separate ways, one involving an image and the other involving a verbal code or meaning. Notice how in the example below, the concrete words would be a lot easier to remember than the abstract ones.

Figure 1. Concrete words are easier to remember than abstract ones because they are dually encoded: they have a verbal code and an image code.

Dare to insert text-based slides in your presentation, with the condition that people can “picture” that text without much mental effort.

Chunking. The frequently recalled slides could be “grouped” around the same topic (what to wear and what not to wear). People remembered these slides in the conditions where slides were shuffled, so the slides above did not appear in sequence. Slides with tight links are remembered more than slides with weak links. For your next presentation, wonder how easy it would be for viewers to identify a few groups (preferably no more than 3) in your presentation. Sometimes, the error that people make is to provide too many groups or not specify how slides relate to a certain group.

Color coordination can often help group slides together. Notice how in the example below, there are four sections, each indicated by its own color.

Figure 2. Color can help chunk various parts of a presentation

The cautionary part about using colors to group slides in a presentation is that memory works on a chaining mechanism. The recall of an item depends on its predecessors, and items that appear later in the chain (or in this case, slides that appear later in the presentation) depend on the accurate recall of previous items. While color helps with chunking, it may not provide a link that is strong enough between various items.

For your next presentation, ask this question: if I asked viewers to relate slides at the end to slides at the beginning, would they be able to easily form a connection? Often endings are rushed. Presenters run out of time and often there is more emphasis on particular content than on connections between different parts of the presentation. Keep in mind that connections between content parts are just as important to memory as discussing individual content parts. Each time you introduce a new content piece, ask and answer: how does it integrate with everything else?

Novelty. Participants in the study who identified themselves as novices in the topic of webcasting (the content for the presentations they were asked to remember), tended to remember more slides than those who considered themselves experts. This may be explained by looking at a psychological construct called schemas —cognitive frameworks that help us organize and interpret information around us. Schemas influence the way new information is processed and they guide our expectations of what should occur. When information deviates from existing schema, attention is enhanced, which may lead to better recall. Research in advertising hints at a similar fact: those viewers exposed to unfamiliar ads engage in more extensive processing and those exposed to familiar ads are less engaged and involved in more confirmation-based processing.

Sometimes experts “brush over” information, thinking they already know it and therefore not much is retained. A practical guideline is that if you want a presentation to attract attention, find out what your audience would consider novel. A thorough audience analysis can be revealing.

Repetition was another trait shared by the four most recalled slides. The word “wear” was repeated several times, such as in what to wear or not to wear (e.g., don’t wear stripes, black, or white; and wear pastels). Linking this to the idea of clustering, research suggests that during recall, words that are repeated along some dimension are recalled successively.² Practically speaking, it may be beneficial for content designers to use similarity of items that are important in a presentation to be recalled. The example below shows how in a professional presentation, words such as RPM, Revenue, and Revolution are repeated on a few slides, making these terms more likely to be recalled later.

Figure 3. Example of repetition in a PowerPoint presentation

Negativity. Another characteristic of the four popular slides is that they contained negative information (e.g., “don’t wear stripes, don’t wear white, don’t wear black”). Several other researchers contend³ that negative information is more memorable in the sense that people tend to remember more details. This may be because the right fusiform gyrus, a region in the brain responsible for processing exemplar-specific details, displays higher activity during the successful encoding of negative objects. If recalling details is important to you, then expressing content in negative terms may be a solution to consider. If remembering the gist of the information is sufficient, then positive content is suitable.

Vanity. Slides that reported a high recall in the study were slides that offered advice that made the viewers “look good” (e.g. avoid wearing white, black or stripes in a webcast; wear pastels). In a society that craves portraying positive images, it is understandable that ego enhancing content attracts additional attention, which may translate into improved recall. Notice in the example below how the self-boosting messages (paired up with concrete words), may lead to attention and improved recall. We will quiz you next week to see if it worked.

Figure 4. Ego-boosting content leads to better recall

Citations
¹Unnava, H. R., Burnkrant, R. E., & Erevelles, S. (1994). Effects of presentation order and communication modality on recall and attitude. Journal of Consumer Research, 21, 481–490.
²Howard,M.W., & Kahana, M. J. (2002). When does semantic similarity help episodic retrieval? Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 85–98.
³Kensinger, E. A., Garoff-Eaton, R. J., & Schacter, D. L. (2007). Effects of emotion on memory specificity: Memory trade-offs elicited by negative visually arousing stimuli. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 575-591.

The post Better PowerPoint: What we remember from PowerPoint presentations, Part 2 appeared first on Poll Everywhere's Blog.

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.

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. 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.

The post The Coca Cola Super Bowl Poll Blackout appeared first on Poll Everywhere's Blog.

In our never ending quest to make presentations less boring , we’ve invited Dr. Carmen Simon(formerly Taran) to guest author a new series on Better PowerPoint.  Dr. Simon is a cognitive scientist, a leader in the virtual presentation movement, and an internationally renowned public speaker. Dr. Simon is a founder of Rexi Media, a world wide presentation consulting firm. This is part one (including study background) in a series based on her research published this year. 

I have recently completed a study that examined the intersection of cognitive psychology and communication from the perspective of one tool: PowerPoint. I was motivated to carry the study because I have noticed these three trends in the past decade:

A dichotomy in information processing habits: on one hand, we crave information (spending 60+ hours a week on line, consuming content), and on the other, we grumble how we are overwhelmed by so much information.

Ubiquitous use of PowerPoint for information processing, particularly as a standalone offering (a quick search through Slideshare.net confirms the growing trend of on-demand PowerPoint presentations).

PowerPoint-based presentations that look very similar, making it more difficult for messages to stand out (how many presentations have you seen lately where either you can’t remember who created them or they looked similar to something else you saw months ago?).

These observations invite the question: how does one distinguish a particular on-demand PowerPoint presentation, given existing informational noise and competition?

Study Methodology

1,540 subjects participated in the study, where I started with a very basic question applied to a very basic on-demand presentation: How many slides does a viewer remember, on average, from a text-only, standalone online PowerPoint presentation containing 20 slides? To answer this question, I used the isolation effect theory, according to which, items (in this case slides) that stand out in some way from a homogenous list have a higher likelihood of being recalled.

Study Results

1. Participants remembered an average of 4 slides from a 20-slide, standalone, text-only PowerPoint presentation.
2. Neutral visuals help, but they don’t change the rule of 4. There was a statistically significant difference between the recall of content in text-only slides versus slides that contained text and neutral visuals. However, the recall rate did not exceed 4 slides in any of the 26 PowerPoint deck manipulations included in the study.
3. Participants tended to remember the same content, not slides at random, as was predicted. This means that it may be possible to control what people remember by using a certain set of criteria.
4. For standing out, 5 is an important number. Applying the isolation effect every n^th slide (3^rd, 4^th, or 5^th) did not impact the overall recall of an entire deck.However, when a change was made every 5^th position (i.e., slides 5, 10, 15, and 20), those slides tended to be remembered better than any other randomly selected slides from that deck. The reverse was true for slides changed in every 3^rd and 4^th position.

These findings can be linked to a set of practical and immediately transferable guidelines for anyone who creates on-demand presentations. Let’s start with the first one.

Part One:  The Magic Number Four

No article on memory capacity and short-term memory can escape without quoting Miller’s classic “seven plus or minus two”, which has often been used in the fields of psychology and education as pillars for creating guidelines on information processing and communication design. Back in the 50s, Miller contended that there is a limit in the number of items that working memory can retain (namely, 7±2).

Other researchers have since questioned the limitations of memory capacity, suggesting that the new magic number is 4±1, and that people form clusters of no more than three or four items to recall. When memorizing lists, some researchers observed that items in a list entered a fixed-capacity rehearsal buffer and displaced a randomly selected item already there, when the capacity of approximately four items had been exceeded. Newer research suggests that the capacity for visual working memory is limited to four items. In a “list” or PowerPoint presentation of 20 slides, if information after 4 slides starts to be displaced by other items that were just viewed, it makes sense that the average recall rate would be 4 slides from the entire list. The good news is that if we know that the amount of slides people remember is limited, that means we don’t have to try so hard on every single slide we present.

Let’s Test What You’ve Learned.  Which is Better?

Even though this study was created in an on-demand setting, let’s reflect how this would apply in a face-to-face setting, where a presenter is involved. Imagine that someone had to present the file below. Can you sense how everything is so intense on every slide and each slide may have taken a long time and quite a bit of money to develop?

And at the opposite end, can you tell how “weak” the content is in the example below, where someone did not take that much time to place text in a sequence of slides?

So, which way is better?

Surprisingly, while both examples may have good content, they are equally bad where memory is concerned. This is because when everything is equally intense or equally weak, something has got to give. In an environment where there is a presenter, the content has a chance because the presenter can do something to deviate from sameness (e.g., invite participants to answer questions, participate in a group exercise, or switch from PowerPoint to a software demo).

In an on-demand situation, the slides are all you’ve got. How do you control which slides people remember? More about that next week.

The post Better PowerPoint: What We REALLY Remember From PowerPoint Presentations appeared first on Poll Everywhere's Blog.

Introducing Poll Everywhere Labs–where our mad scientists animate new life.

Compelled by dark forces beyond their control, Poll Everywhere’s team of radical engineers have concocted schemes beyond your wildest imagination to make your presentations fantabulous, incredible, or just plain NOT BORING.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s currently alive available.  Remember, all these features are in Beta, so this stuff can change, break, or decompose disappear at any time.  

Discourses:  allow your audience to vote on free text responses.  Perfect for brainstorming and large Audience Q&A.

Simple Keywords:  allow your live audience to vote with A, B, C etc on multiple choice polls; and without entering a keyword prefix for free text polls.  Note that this product does not currently work with Twitter.

HTML5 Polls:  watch our progress as we move to a flashless world.

Poll Sorting:  Choose how to sort polls within groups on your My Polls page.

Copy Entire Groups of Polls:  great for copying surveys and reducing data entry overhead for conferences asking the same set of questions after many breakout sessions; or by educators using similar questions in multiple sections.

(Not)Boring Mode:  Where the dark yet playful imaginations come out to play.  See hidden funny surprises around our site.

If you dare, visit Poll Everywhere Labs and let us know:  Which creatures features are you most excited about trying?

And in the meantime….

The post WARNING: Mad Scientists Take Over Poll Everywhere appeared first on Poll Everywhere's Blog.

Blended Margaritas–for when your work is through!

Today is part 3 in a 3 part series from Dr. Jenny Hooie, author of Blend: Implement Blended Learning In Seven Days or Less.  She also teaches online courses in blended learning.  Part 1 can be found here. Part 2 can be found here. 

Blended Learning: Putting the Pieces Together

In the previous two posts, we have defined blended learning and implemented a single blended lesson. Now that you have tried blended learning you may be prepared to expand to a larger blended project. In order to implement on a regular basis you need to address three areas: device, content and design.

Device: There is a common misunderstanding that every student must have a device and sometimes even that every student must have the same device in order to implement any blended learning strategy. Let me be very clear about this: THIS IS SIMPLY NOT TRUE! Yes, since the learning tools and content will be on the web, students must have access. However, there are many ways to deal with this need. Keep in mind one of the main goals for implementing blended learning in the first place, is to provide individualized learning and different learning paths for students. All students sitting in a classroom doing the same activity, even if they all have a computer or tablet in front of them, is no different from traditional instruction. Three possible options include a handful of devices (gather any technology you can to use in small groups in your classroom, remember the devices must access the internet), BYOT (Students use their own devices at school or at home) and Labs/Carts (existing groups of computers in the building).

Content: Once you have the device and know how the students will access the lessons or activities, you now have to consider the question – what?

• What content will the students access?
• What tools/applications will we use? I suggest begin by searching the free resources/lessons/activities on the internet. There are literally so many resources that you can easily become overwhelmed. I suggest setting aside 20-30 minutes each week to search and explore resources. Realistically, once you start this it can turn into hours, so I sometimes set a time limit for myself.

Design: You have now considered the Device and the Content, the final consideration is putting it all together in an instructional design. This is the art of putting it all together and creating a learning path for each student that matches his or her instructional needs. To do this you will need a Learning Management System (LMS). There are less structured resources like Edmodo (www.edmodo.com), which looks like a social media site and more structured options like Schoology (www.schoology.com). Again, a quick internet search for a free LMS will provide tons for you to explore.

Once you have these three areas, the options for creating blended learning lessons and units are endless.

About the Author:

Dr. Jenny Hooie is an educational innovator with over twenty years of experience as a teacher, administrator and professional development facilitator. Her doctorate in the area of Instructional Design for Online Learning combined with her real world experience in classrooms, and her professional development work with practicing teachers make her the perfect guide as you explore blended learning strategies and make them part of your daily classroom instruction. Jenny is currently the Chief Instructional Officer for Tri Rivers Educational Computer Association and Chief Executive Officer of Instructional Design Innovations. Her email is jen@i-d-innovations.com.

The post Blended Learning: Week 3 appeared first on Poll Everywhere's Blog.

Blended Learning: Start With One Lesson at a Time

You may be hesitating to implement blended learning because, with everything else you have to deal with on a daily basis, the idea is just overwhelming. I encourage you to try by implementing one single lesson or strategy. I don’t mean an entire unit, just one lesson.

In order for change to be effective, you must be able to see tangible, positive results. You must also have the motivation to stay with the change without giving up. These are the reasons you should begin small. Of course, if you try to blend your entire math or reading program without trying something smaller first, you may become so overwhelmed that you just give up. By selecting one lesson at a time, you have the ability to see the results, make necessary improvements and try the strategy again with another lesson. If you continue this process two things happen: you learn and you gain momentum. These small steps lead to bigger blended units and eventually the strategies become an integral part of your classroom.

While I caution you to start small, I also caution you to actually do it. If you spend a year planning and never actually implement a blended lesson or strategy, then you have wasted precious time. In education we often “over plan” on projects in which the scope is too large, the result is no change or improvement at all. So please, at least, try one small activity or lesson.

Suggestions:

1. Identify a lesson or activity to blend. Example: let’s say you are planning a pre assessment
2. Next, you should gather the necessary resources. You will need a tool for the assessment and Internet devices for student access. Many blended implementations come to a halt when teachers are faced with gathering internet devices because they wrongly assume that all of the students need the same devices and/or that the students must be using the device at the same time. Instead, introduce the activity the day before and enable students to use any technology in the classroom or the technology they have at home. In our example the pre assessment would be introduced the day before and allow students to take turns with the technology in your classroom or building, or complete the assessment on their own at home using a phone, tablet or computer. Example: let’s give a three question multiple-choice poll on Poll Everywhere.
3. Utilize the results prior and during your lesson. This could mean you review the results prior to the lesson and make adjustments based on the results and/or you project the results and share them with students. Example: We ask the students to complete the pre assessment by 8:00 pm the night before the lesson. We provide options in class to access the assessment and also give the option for students to complete at home on their own. We review the results the morning before the lesson and adjust based on the results.

This may seem like a very small start to blended learning. This is by design. By starting small you are able to try blending instruction in a safe, easy way. You will experience success and try another lesson, and before you know it blended learning will be a regular part of your instructional toolbox.

Next Week: Putting The Pieces Together

About the Author:

Dr. Jenny Hooie is an educational innovator with over twenty years of experience as a teacher, administrator and professional development facilitator. Her doctorate in the area of Instructional Design for Online Learning combined with her real world experience in classrooms, and her professional development work with practicing teachers make her the perfect guide as you explore blended learning strategies and make them part of your daily classroom instruction. Jenny is currently the Chief Instructional Officer for Tri Rivers Educational Computer Association and Chief Executive Officer of Instructional Design Innovations. Her email is jen@i-d-innovations.com.

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