Sometimes it just hard to know.

When you look at the faces around you, in your audience or your classroom, or increasingly, in remote spaces with folks you cannot see,  you just don’t really know if anyone is with you. What do they understand? What are the issues? If they are on their devices, are they taking thoughtful notes or shopping for shoes?

If you are presenting, what do folks really think about your message? Have you engaged them? Do they agree with your points? To what degree? What other ideas might your audience or team have?

If you are flipping, did they watch your lesson?  Have they learned?  Where do they stand on the issues? What questions remain? What new ideas are emerging?

I used to mash up a bunch of platforms to get the feedback I craved.  Now, a number of programs address the notion that our presentation and lessons need not be one-way events and they do it all, eliminating the need for mashup.

Zeetings: This attractive, web-based platform enables users to simply interact with audiences by enhancing PowerPoints and PDFs with video, web content, images and polls.  Presentations may be broadcast. Audience members who have the code, may participate from their own devices anywhere, synchronously or asynchronously.  No need to login, no need to download anything.  Poll options include: thumbs up/down, multiple choice, scale or rank.

Zeetings poll options

Swipe: Swipe’s goal is to help you turn presentations into real-time conversations.  Drag and drop or upload files of nearly any type –PDFs, photos, video from YouTube, Vimeo–and combine them with your own slides.  Users may create responsive slides from scratch in the Swipe editor.  It’s easy to scootch or reorder content.  Share your presentation with anyone anywhere with the link conveniently available under the title.  Presentations are collaborative. With permission, other users edit a shared presentation in real-time.  A variety of permissions options allow for levels of collaboration.

Officemix:  This add-on to the Microsoft Office suite enables users to add questions, polls, video and more to create more interactive Powerpoint presentations.  You can easily screencast your presentations with flexible narration and video features. The platform should work as well for student presentations as professional presentations and flipped instruction.  And, because it capitalizes on everyone’s familiarity with and the robust presentation features of the Powerpoint platform, this is likely to be a very easy sell in professional development and with classroom teachers.  Note: Officemix is not yet available for Mac. Also note: Microsoft Sway presents yet another interactive report/presentation/storytelling option, based on a modern, media-rich canvas rather than slides.