Using RevealJS for Lab Warm-ups

Testing

2023-09-01

About Me

Brad Cannell, PhD, MPH
Associate Professor
UTHealth-Houston School of Public Health

• Press the “S” key to bring up the presenter view.
• Introduce myself

In class lab warm-ups

At the beginning of each in-person lab session students will complete a warm-up together as a class, along with the instructor, using a series of interactive poll questions that provide immediate feedback. These activities will not be graded; however, participating gives students an opportunity to self-assess their comprehension and ask questions.

Click here for more info

Poll Everywhere

Why are we switching from Socrative to Poll Everywhere?

1. We (UTHealth) have an institutional Poll Everywhere paid account.

2. Hopefully, we won’t have to switch back and forth between Socrative, RStudio, and PowerPoint during the lab warm-up. The idea is that we will be able to embed text, R code, R results, and poll questions directly into RevealJS slides or PowerPoint. As of this writing, we are still trying to figure out the best option.

Embed a Poll Everywhere Activity

• The blog post
  • https://support.polleverywhere.com/hc/en-us/articles/1260801821849-Embed-an-activity

Step 1. Create a poll everywhere activity.

Step 2. Add activities to the RevealJS slides using embed code. See the blog post from slide one.

Current issues

After creating a RevealJS slide deck, Poll Everywhere activities aren’t displayed when we open the slides by double-clicking the HTML file.

• Is this because only one activity can be active at a time?

• Is it still an issue if we serve the slides from GitHub pages?

• Is it still an issue if we try a different embed type (i.e., Response link, PollEv page, or Live presentation view)

• Can I use index as a series of links to other slide shows? Why would we do this? Because the Poll Everywhere links don’t work if we just share the HTML file (even with embed-resources: true). They do work when we serve the slide show from gh-pages, but we don’t want to create a separate repo for each slide show. Therefore, we can link to the slideshows from the index page of the gh-pages branch?

Poll Everywhere Response Link

This slide uses an embedded response link script

Use this link to collect responses even when the activity is not activated. Participants can respond asynchronously or over a long period of time.

Poll Everywhere PollEv Page

This slide uses an embedded PollEv page script

• Use this page to present an activity to a live audience. The page will always display the activity that is currently activated on the account.
• You have to actually go into Poll Everywhere and click the “Activate” button.
• Don’t forget to click “Deactivate” when you’re done.

Poll Everywhere Live Presentation View

This slide uses an embedded live presentation view script

• Share this link to reveal the real-time chart for your activity.
• I think this is the view I will typically need to use in class.

• Same slide as before. This time there just isn’t a title to the slide.

Sharing slides

1. You can publish on GitHub. See the Test Quarto Book for Details.

2. You can share as a PDF file.

3. You can create a self-contained HTML file by adding the embed-resources: true option to the yaml header.

• It seems like the Poll Everywhere questions don’t work if we use the embed-resources: true option.
• In fact, it seems like the Poll Everywhere questions don’t work unless I’m actively rendering the document from an RStudio session.
• It does seem to work when I publish to GitHub, though.

Serving from gh-pages

Do the Poll Everywhere iframe’s work if I serve the slides from gh-pages?