Rationale

Rationale: Mentimeter as an educational tool

How it functions as an educational tool


The use of Mentimeter in classrooms has skyrocketed since the pandemic when the shift to online learning has begun. Remote learning can be very challenging without being about to receive instant student feedback. Traditionally, teachers can either nominate students to respond or rely on students to volunteer to speak. In this situation, this means the more confident students respond, or students are put on the spot by teacher’s nominations. Notwithstanding, this form of receiving responses is very helpful in the physical classroom, but not so much in an online classroom.


After two and a half years of Zoom classes and online learning, even active and confident students might enter a stage of “Zoom fatigue”. According to Wiederhold (2020), the issue with these video conferencing programs is the delay in communication. Although the communications might seem to happen in real-time, even though it’s just a slight delay, our brain is trying to overcome the delay and restore synchrony (Wiederhold, 2020). The process of restoring synchrony requires intense focus and as a result higher psychological demand. Given that there are various unfavorable circumstances during online lessons, students who are normally more confident in answering questions might feel overwhelmed. One way to address this issue is through Student Response Systems (SRS). SRS, which is also known as clickers, is a “digital tool that can be used to increase students’ activity in a lecture setting” (Krumsvik, Jones & Klock, 2020).SRS includes Mentimeter, Kahoot, Poll Everywhere, Plickers, Quizziz, GoSoapBox etc. They reflect instant and anonymous responses to different questions and discussion prompts. Among all of the programs, the versatility and the unlimited number of participants, it is believed that Mentimeter has greater potential in facilitating discussion and promoting students’ motivation to keep proactive in online learning classrooms, even in this post-pandemic season.

Literature Review / Case study

Previous works of literature have recorded some of the case studies which utilized Mentimeter in their educational settings. Moorehouse (2017) has demonstrated how to incorporate Mentimeter in a language acquisition workshop, with the Word Cloud and Open-ended questions functions.


Reference: Moorehouse (2017)

The first activity is brainstorming words through the Word Cloud function. Workshop participants were required to enter a single-word response into the prompt slide. As participants type in their answers, their responses will be directly reflected on the screen shared by the presenter. The more frequently the same word has been answered, the larger it will be on the screen. The instant reflected responses allowed students to elicit and brainstorm numerous words in a short period of time, by reviewing others’ answers and being reminded of similar words (Moorehouse, 2017).


The second activity is using the words previously displayed on the Word Cloud slide, participants will create tongue twisters and submit them to this open-ended question slide. This open-ended response allows participants to submit a maximum of 250-character responses. Just like the previous slide, participants can submit multiple times to the prompt (Moorehouse, 2017).


Reference: Moorehouse (2017)

Moorehouse (2017) reflected on this workshop and shed light on the advantages of using Mentimeter in their planned activities. The author concluded the workshop by using Mentimeter has efficiently practiced and developed a whole range of skills in language acquisition. For instance:

  • Raising phonetic awareness by reading out loud different sounds of the same letter;

  • The process of developing tongue twisters has reinforced their grammatical knowledge;

  • Enhanced reading fluency by repeating the tongue twisters over and over;

  • Encouraged creativity during the writing session.

The author also pointed out that the anonymous feature of responding on Mentimeter has encouraged students to trial and error, as they will not be put on the spot when they have made a mistake. At the same time, they will be motivated to have multiple attempts. This promoted a vigorous learning atmosphere and environment for learners to trial and error.