Meeting Pulse - Connect with your Class

I saw a neat service by Microsoft that is in beta right now called Pulse that allows you to use some real-time tools to stay in touch with your audience.  But, it's only free for another month and then it becomes very expensive.  I mean VERY expensive.  My sense is it's built for bigger companies and organizations that don't care about their budgets.

So it got me to thinking whether or not there was a simple, free tool that would do the same.  I know Socrative and PollEverywhere will do these but I wanted something dead simple and especially one that kept the pulse on the audience.  A quick Google search turned up MeetingPulse which fit the bill perfectly.  What is has going for it is that it's free.  It's very easy to set up.  You can sign up with your Google account.  And it's easy for the audience to find and access your poll which allows your audience to interact with you during your presentation.

Create an account and an event with a unique URL and once you start it your audience goes to the site to see what you're asking them to do.  There are four options:

1. Pulse - the audience simply taps on their device Agree, Disagree, Not Clear, or Too Slow and the results populate on the presenter's screen immediately.  The responses only stick around for ten seconds and they pulse is reset.
2. Polls - the presenter can ask a simple question that they audience can reply to, like PollEverywhere
3. Questions - the audience can enter a question and the presenter gets a notification that someone has a question and can choose to address it or not.  Others can upvote the questions.
4. Raffle - this function keeps the audience engaged by randomly selecting one of them to win whatever you're giving away.  Conversely, it could be to choose a student to answer a question.  Their device will blink and tell them they've won!

Check out the video below: