MeeToo online polling

March 31, 2016 at 4:24 pm | Posted in student response systems, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

MeeToo is designed as a business tool to support meetings and conferences, but provides some strong educational features. Its overall design is clean and modern, and I found the user interface simple to understand and quick to use. The messaging feature in particular offers some interesting new ways to communicate with the class, get comments/questions/feedback from them and make it easy for students to indicate which of these they agree with. The free PowerPoint add-in offers similar ease-of-use to TurningPoint and really integrates the questions into your slides.

Meetings: A collection of poll questions are called a Meeting, which are named (e.g. MANG1001 week 1) and have a defined start and end date/time. Each meeting has a unique nine-digit ID (eg 121-284-301) which students will use to access the questions and vote. An Invite button makes it simple to send an email with the key details, including a link to the iOS and Android apps. Students can also vote using any modern web browser.

Messages: If enabled (default is ON), Messages can be sent by the Host (tutor) to all students, and students can send messages which again everyone can read.  The Host can edit or manually hide any message. The Host can also activate Moderation (default is OFF) which means that all new messages are stored in an area called Needs Review. The Host can then drag these to another area; Reviewed, Published or Hidden. This enables the Host to select which messages students see in a very controlled way.

A ‘thumbs-up’ icon next to each published message enables students to quickly indicate their agreement, and provides another way to gauge opinion and conduct quick polls based on student suggestions. In a lecture it would also enable students to easily provide feedback to the tutor about which questions (from other students) they would most like the tutor to address.

A neat feature for the Host is the ability to activate a ‘Projector’ mode that opens a new browser window that just shows the messages in a chosen area (e.g Reviewed)  as well as the number of ‘likes’ each is receiving. It looks like this will work best for say 5 or 6 chosen messages without scrolling.

Polls: All questions are simple multiple choice or multiple response with a set number of allowed selections. Results can be shown as number of votes, % of votes, or both. To create a question the tutor just types the question text and the answer choices (one per line). There is no support for formatting, maths or images. The interface makes it easy to duplicate, delete or edit questions. Polls can be individually opened and closed by the Host, and student votes are immediately shown on the tutor’s screen. Again there is a ‘Projector’ mode that opens in a new browser window and shows the current question and answer choices, but not the live polling results. When polling is closed the tutor can push the results to the ‘projector’ and to the students’ screens.

PowerPoint Add-in: this free download for Windows PowerPoint (only) uses Microsoft’s .NET framework, which may require an additional download depending on your version of Windows. It adds the MeeToo ribbon to PowerPoint which makes it easy to add questions to new or existing presentations. Standard slides that have the question as the slide title and the options as a bulleted list can be automatically converted to a question slide. It is also possible to add Analysis slides that either a) show the results of up to six polls on the same screen, b) recall the results of a previous poll or c) total the results of up to six polls. Options a) and c) require all polls to have the same number of answer options. Display options include the ability to hide the results, show a countdown clock, play sounds  during and at the end of polling, and (very neatly) select chart elements so they can be easily formatted and styled to match the rest of the presentation. All of these are ‘per slide’ – there is no way to apply these choices to all slides. A ‘sample results’ button simplifies testing of questions if required.

The tutor needs to access their MeeToo account in advance to set up the Meeting, since the meeting ID (as well as their username and password) is required to connect PowerPoint. A button on the toolbar then provides instant access to the MeeToo web dashboard. Questions created in PowerPoint are copied to the dashboard when the questions are displayed.

During the presentation, question slides are initially displayed with polling disabled and the tutor must press Enter to start polling (and the countdown timer if used) and Enter again to stop polling and display the results (unless hidden by choice).

Cost: MeeToo offers a free educational licence for up to 100 students/lecture. Annual licences are available for 500 students (£845) and 1000 students (£1495) but this is for a single user (tutor) and although this might be awkwardly sharable between a programme team, there is no multi-tutor site licence available.