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.

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What's in a m-learning toolkit? Well according to Jenni Parker that would be tools like twitter, Audacity, FrontlineSMS, and (you guessed it) Poll Everywhere! Check out Jenni's thesis, embedded below, to learn about mobile training activities that are applicable not only in developing countries but in your own classroom as well.

"The result of [Jenni's] thesis project is a Mobile Learning Toolkit that is designed to empower trainers in Africa and other developing contexts to integrate mobile learning into their teaching." from Jenni Parker's blog

best viewed in 'book' mode | the toolkit is open source and available for download

Meet Jenni Parker.

Originally from Scotland, Jenni recently graduated from Politecnico di Milano, Italy with an MS in Product Service Systems Design. She is currently working for the Global Learning Centre of the UNHCR in Budapest.

We stumbled across Jenni (and her wonderful thesis) a few months ago. Jenni has dedicated her studies to teaching in developing contexts, through the use of mobile learning. Jenni would like to stress the opensource nature of her thesis. "No one ever reads your thesis ... [and] I wanted to do something useful." She encourages you to share her project and contact her with any comments or questions.

Onlineeducation.net put together an infographic about college students and technology:

• Some of it is obvious: "98% of college students own a digital device"
• Some of it is perplexing (yet reassuring): College students spend "181.43 avg. minutes/per day on cell texting"
• Some of it is alarming: "A University of Maryland study asked students not to use media for 24 hours. A large percentage of the students experienced symptoms similar to drug and alcohol withdrawal."

Check it out! (The notes in this graphic must have been written by one of the 30% of students who don't use a digital device for note taking ...)

Via: OnlineEducation.net

We call them your "participants".

You might call them your audience, your voters, your students, or your attendees.

Whatever you call them, there's a good chance you have hundreds of them, and you want to have accurate data in Poll Everywhere. The Registered Participants feature is one of the ways you can identify who responded. It's also used for grade reports and restricting who can respond.

We found there are lots of times where the administrator just needs to help a participant get the right information into Poll Everywhere, whether it's resetting a password for someone at a live event, or double checking the phone number on file after class.

On your Participants List, just click "edit".

Here's a demo video showing both participant registration and an administrator editing that information later.

Many thanks to Geri, for posting a great in-depth instructional video yesterday. 

In Geri's video she explains how she uses Poll Everywhere in the classroom, offers advice on administering polls effectively, and describes some of her "more fun and more effective uses." 

Enjoy!

It's no coincidence that we set the number of allowed responses at 32 responses per poll when we first launched our education plans at Poll Everywhere over one year ago. Why 32 responses? Because we read somewhere that was the average size of a classroom in the United States. Since then, we've learned that averages don't count for much when a teacher wanted to try Poll Everywhere in a classroom with 35 students, but couldn't because we only allowed 32 responses per poll.

Today that limitation ends with our classroom size promise. We started by increasing the classroom size limit on our K-12 free plan from 32 students to 40, but we didn't just stop there. If your classroom has over 40 students, you can contact us, explain your situation, and we'll accomodate you as best we can. We go into all the details in our FAQ.

Our goal is still to make a product that educators love so much that they eventually pay for our premium features, like the awesome new segmentation feature. While we can't sustainably give everything away for free, we're thrilled that classroom size is one less thing educators need to worry about when they're evaluating Poll Everywhere as a classroom response system.

Hi - I'm Jeff, one of the Poll Everywhere cofounders.

About a week ago, we developed a feature that archives results into a timeline instead of just clearing them away forever. We knew this would be especially useful for educators who would like to reuse their polls with multiple classes and yet retain the previous answers, or for measuring knowledge before-and-after. In the future, we'll add the ability to visually compare these various runs of a poll on a graph.

We like educators for a variety of reasons, so in the past we've told teachers they can clear their results and reuse their polls with other classes. Technically, they have more than the 32 participants allowed on the free plan, but we decided to kind of look the other way mostly for mutual convenience.  One thing is certain, the more participants on any given question, the more you're benefitting from our service.

In the process of preparing this results history / archival feature, we analyzed our usage and found that the users that do this can be REALLY expensive for us.

I know we've all been conditioned to expect a free product from every web company out there, but the trend is not going this way. More and more web companies are transitioning to a "30 day free trial" model.  We've considered it many times, because if the percentage of people who remain regular users and never actually upgrade continues, we might not be able to sustain the incredible cost of text messages for our many free users. It probably costs Google less than $1 per year to provide Gmail to one person. They advertise to you, which is something we will never do. You also can't call or email anyone for help (sometimes if you pray and wait long enough, someone from Google might respond). In contrast, considering that we pay the mobile phone companies several cents for each text message, a disturbing proportion of free users (overwhelmingly educators) cost us over $50/user/year in texting fees, and that's before we spend any time on customer support. Can you see why we're on the fence regarding whether that's really sustainable business?  The truth is that most free products that educators love do not have back end costs anywhere near ours. It's something to really think about.

In fact, if you wonder why we have free K-12 plans at all, it's because I was a high school teacher and CIO of a school district. I felt clickers were valuable but outrageously expensive. Sometimes I have to re-convince the other people here at Poll Everywhere to keep our free plan limits at 32 participants instead of say, 10. It doesn't help my case when we see whining dramatics like this:

"This is so frustrating and upsetting. I am a teacher who JUST started using Poll Everywhere two weeks ago in my classroom after learning about it at a technology integration day. My students loved it the ONE time we used it, when Clear Results still worked. My district will NOT PURCHASE a membership; they don't believe in supporting this sort of technology; we are on our own to find and use this stuff. Your rate for one teacher is MUCH TOO HIGH for me to pay out of my own pocket! How frustrating that I cannot compile results any longer without forking over such a steep fee. And to think that I was considering this to be a very advantageous tool to use in my classroom! I can use it but not compile results for separate classes. How unfair of you, and how greedy."

"NOT PURCHASE" in capital letters? "Unfair" and "greedy"? Perhaps this was an emotionally driven response from a moment of frustration, but try purchasing the cheapest set of 32 clickers for $1500 out of your own pocket. By comparison, we're currently priced at $129/year. In 11 years you break even, and your clickers won't be getting any smarter during that time, but you'll still be lugging them around and replacing their batteries. This is like lusting after a Ferrari while calling the $12,000 Kia makers "greedy."  Be proactive, and start educating your district on the benefits of student response. Apply for a grant. Solicit parent or corporate sponsors. Or simply say, "It's not as good as it used to be, but at least you provide something useful for free." It's time for a reality check, since we're teetering on the brink of whether to provide any free service all. Web companies such as Blinksale, GoToMeeting, CrazyEgg, Jott, and many others have chosen to eliminate their free plans (or switch to free trials).

So let's start over. First, we didn't give you any notice that clearing polls was going premium. We didn't grandfather any previous users. And most importantly, the inability to reset a poll turns out to be a major inconvenience to all users when they try it out for the first time, then want to reuse that poll to demo to others at their church or company.  Therefore, we're turning "clear results" back on for all users. Also, we are keeping perpetually free plans for educators around, at least for now. We're considering other EDU pricing models, and I know first hand how tight school technology budgets are.  When we announce new pricing, I hope we see you vote with your school budget wallets. Sorry for the flip-flopping. If you upgraded to either the $15/mo or $129/yr plan in the last week solely in order to regain the ability to clear polls, please email us and we'll refund you.

We received a fair amount of feedback on our Get Satisfaction page (http://getsatisfaction.com/polleverywhere) and also via email. We do listen and respond to our customers -- every inquiry that needs a response gets a response. Thank you to those who engaged us respectfully. We're also wondering if you'd like a dedicated bulletin board style user forum on PollEverywhere.com. Please leave comments if you feel you'd use it more than you use our existing Get Satisfaction forum.

Also, we'd appreciate it if you'd leave some comments here and tell us what your other education software costs, and if you cover it out of pocket or your school pays for it.