The following article is a guest post and looks at the story behind Meetoo, their real-time polling add-in for PowerPoint from Lumi, a Microsoft Partner.
Microsoft helps Meetoo to scale up with 400% increase in adoption rate
“The feedback from teachers and lecturers alike is that PowerPoint is the essential pedagogic tool in the classroom or lecture theatre. I began lecturing at the City University back in 2009 and the first thing I was told by the Dean was to build the lecture course around PowerPoint. And what is more, even a non-techie person such as myself could make it work.” – Mark Beilby, executive chairman, Meetoo
Lectures can be challenging for students and teaching staff alike. For the students, there’s often too much information to absorb in one go, with little chance of asking questions. Lecturers are equally in the dark, unable to gauge how much their students have understood and will remember the moment they leave the building. Large business meetings can have a similar effect; there’s something about being ‘talked at’ that causes the mind to wander and eyelids to droop.
Meetoo has been designed to challenge these dated and unproductive scenarios and instead encourage interaction and engagement. Downloadable onto any smartphone or accessible via the web, Meetoo is a small, affordable and straightforward platform with the potential to transform lectures, training sessions and business meetings into compelling, interactive and energising events.
It enables lecturers and training managers to create live polls in seconds, the audience to vote immediately and then watch the results arrive in real-time. This means lecturers and teachers can test students’ understanding, enabling them to focus their time on topics which need more attention. Respondents can answer anonymously, if wished – to enable more inclusive involvement and more accurate insight into understanding and views.
Question and answer sessions can also be pushed out to the floor and audiences can share ideas, add ‘likes’ and give feedback – all overseen by the presenter or a moderator who can manage the proceedings. Stats and feedback can be captured after the event for future reference.
Opening up the education world
Meetoo was enjoying steady take-up in the business world, but the company recognised that one area where it could offer users significant value was education – particularly in higher and further education including training and other learning environments. Although it worked well as a standalone tool, most customers based their teaching around a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Poll results could be viewed on individual smartphones, but this didn’t have the same impact, or provide the same discussion point as seeing these graphs on a larger screen as part of a larger presentation.
“By making their app available on Microsoft’s Office Store, Meetoo have added huge value for PowerPoint users, who can enjoy their simple and elegant platform on a variety of devices without the difficulty of installing complicated software. Teachers or meeting owners with Office 365 just need to select the Meetoo app from the Office Store on Windows or Mac while students or meeting attendees can interact, simply by using their web browser on their own mobile devices – we’ve used this ourselves at a recent all-hands meeting!” – Liam Kelly, Microsoft
Working with Microsoft, Meetoo developed an add-in which fully integrates with PowerPoint. As a result, every Meetoo user – including non-Windows and enterprise installation users – can now insert live polls into their PowerPoints, even during the presentation itself. The results can then be displayed on the screen in real-time as part of the wider presentation.
This facility sets Meetoo apart from other polling apps on the market. As polls can be created on the spot, it provides the flexibility to react and respond to developments during lectures, training sessions and meetings.
The add-in can be downloaded directly from the Microsoft Office store, which means it is easily accessible at all times.
Multiple benefits for Meetoo and its customers too
“I use Meetoo to create a quiz for students during a lecture, it is a great way to get a large number of students all engaged in a different learning context within a lecture theatre. Using the PowerPoint add-in I put in pictures of anatomical features, for example certain components of the heart, for the students to identify,” Dr. Lindsey Smith, senior lecturer in Sport and Physical Education, University of Bedfordshire, told us.
The multiple benefits of the PowerPoint add-in for users include a greater flexibility and the ability to make a session more dynamic by reacting to poll results or having the ability to create a poll ‘on the fly’ to test views or understanding. This can now be done within the parameters of the original presentation, ensuring a smooth, professional approach.
Both Meetoo and the PowerPoint add-in can be downloaded autonomously with the add-in available from the Microsoft Office Store as ‘Meetoo – Real-time polling’ and is compatible with Mac OS and Windows, so is ideal for Mac users or those with tight restrictions on installing software.
The benefits for Meetoo itself are remarkable. It has helped drive a major scale-up of the business thanks to a 400% uplift in adoption over the past year, with over half of these using the Meetoo PowerPoint add-in.
“What we have achieved in the first two months of this year with subscriptions exceeds the stats for the first six months of last year,” says Jon Fowler, Managing Director of SaaS at Meetoo.