Bangor University
Learn how Jeremy Griffiths, Senior Lecturer at Bangor University, used Vevox at a National Conference attended by the Minister for Education for Wales, to allow for seamless audience interaction & engagement.
Using Vevox to facilitate large-scale audience response & engagement
Jeremy Griffiths is a Senior Lecturer at Bangor University, in Wales. He has held various leadership roles at the University, including the position of Executive Director of Initial Teacher Education – in addition to being a retired head teacher at many schools.
Currently, he mainly lectures on master's programmes in leadership, including the Welsh national master's, which is a master’s degree in education across all universities in Wales and an international MA in Singapore. He is also an associate member of the National Academy for Educational Leadership (NAEL) in Wales and works closely with the chief executive of that organisation.
As a result, Jeremy was asked to facilitate a large national conference in Newport, South Wales, that was focused on attendance in schools and trying to re-engage young people back into education. Keynote speakers at the conference were the Minister for Education for Wales, Sir Alistair McDonald and Dr James Manion.
Jeremy used Vevox to facilitate audience response & engagement throughout the day-long conference, and he explained to us why using Vevox for this conference led to a successful day full of interaction and engagement.
The way Vevox worked during the event was brilliant!
Why did Jeremy choose Vevox?
Although Jeremy has used other polling tools in the past, he didn’t feel that they had the functionality to do what he wanted for this event – which was allowing for seamless audience engagement, feedback & interaction throughout the day. Vevox ticked all of the right boxes for what he wanted.
Jeremy hosted the conference and had the Vevox Q&A coming through on his tablet while he had somebody behind the scenes moderating the Q&A. This meant that questions could come in from the audience throughout the conference, with questions monitored so nothing that could be politically embarrassing for the minister went up on the screen.
Jeremy appreciated the ease of use of Vevox and said that he only needed 10 minutes in the morning to train people how to moderate the Q&A.
Jeremy really liked the fact that participants could ‘like’ their peers' responses, which then meant the top responses came to the top. This allowed the most popular questions across a large range of participants to be the ones discussed.
The ability to easily capture and distribute the data collected from a large number of people was another big plus for Jeremy:
"We were able to easily capture the data from all of the participants. The Minister wanted some feedback the very next day, and I was able to provide her that due to the ease of extracting data in Vevox."
Live Polls to break the ice
Running live polls at the start of the conference session helped to break the ice and get participants interacting with Vevox before they started to get into the main part of the discussions around education.
Jeremy says they ran a pin-on image poll so that people could show where they had travelled from to the conference, and every time they ran a new icebreaker poll, the amount of people interacting increased.
How did Vevox increase engagement during the conference?
Jeremy says that Vevox enabled people to stay engaged throughout the whole day of the conference. One of Jeremy’s aims of the conference was to ensure they could capture the feelings and thoughts of 200 plus people – and he says that this is exactly what Vevox did.
Jeremy’s Vevox Top-Tip
"A BIG one is to practice! Also, for presenters at events using Vevox, having a touch screen tablet in front of you is a big help, allowing you to move around the stage while also tracking questions/comments coming in to the Q&A."
