Mentimeter - Stokes

What is Mentimeter?

Mentimeter is touted as an interactive, cloud-based presentation application. It allows users to create online polls, quizzes, and opportunities for interactivity to engage viewers in real time. This tutorial section will provide you with the resources you need to select appropriate types of Mentimeter interactions for your classes and build them effectively.

Question Types

Teaching Tips and Techniques

Ideas for Using Mentimeter

Ice Breakers

Ranking, Word Clouds, and Scales can encourage participants to express their ideas and breakdown barriers of awkwardness before a lesson. Examples include: What's your favourite type of cuisine? What is the best type of music? What additional language do you want to learn? This fosters a sense of inclusion in the class, even for students who are more introverted and less apt to participate.

Brainstorming

Open-ended questions such as Word Cloud allows the entire class to contribute to a brainstorming session. Examples might be: What should we do for our class party? What animal should we study? How do the physical properties of an element relate to its chemical properties? Because Mentimeter can be timed and can limit the amount of characters in a response, students gain practice in creative thinking while using their ability to write clearly and concisely.

Formative or diagnostic assessment

You may want to use Mentimeter to assess how your class feels about their current knowledge and participation in learning activities. While responses are anonymous, it can help give you an idea of what areas may need additional review or if students generally need more support. You can use a variety of question types for this activity, including multiple choice, scales and ranking, and open ended.

Collaborative learning

Mentimeter provides an excellent platform for a variety of collaborative activities. You may have students work in breakout rooms then post their responses to Mentimeter after their discussion. It can be used in a smaller format for a think-pair-share style activity, where partners contribute a response that they have worked on collaboratively.

Gamification Quizzes

A fun way to test knowledge and reinforce understanding of a topic is to use the Quiz question option in Mentimeter to quiz teams of students on lesson content. Cooperative learning can be highlighted here in a Family Feud style competition, which promotes learning and in-depth consideration of the topic.

Consolidation

Use open- or closed-ended question types to gauge students' understanding of a topic after it has been presented, then adjust instruction accordingly. You might ask specific multiple choice questions that contain common misconceptions about the material and address these misconceptions in the next part of the lesson. You may also use Mentimeter as an "exit ticket", a formative assessment tool to see how students are understanding the content.

Tips for Successful Mentimeter Presentations

Prepare the audience

Let the audience know that you're going to do a Mentimeter presentation in advance. This is important so they can bring their smartphone to class or you can find other technology they can use to participate. It is also a good idea to provide them with an overview of how the presentation will work. You may also wish to engage them in discussions about posting appropriate, non-personal material and using good netiquette when they are participating in a Mentimeter presentation. The profanity filter may come in handy here. It would be helpful for students to bookmark the URL of the presentation in advance to avoid last-minute issues.

Check your settings

Adding reactions to slides is a quick way for you to gauge the thoughts and feelings of the audience as you go. Choose from the reactions available in the slide settings panel. You may also want to enable the profanity filter, a different language, or voting pace and time limits.

Give enough time

Before you begin the presentation, make sure all students can connect to the presentation using the QR or voting code. Depending on the bandwidth of your connection, this may take a bit of time. User support also plays a part in how long it takes to start up a presentation. When you are presenting, give the audience time to consider your question before responding. This allows students to consider their responses more deeply (Tobin, 1987). You can keep track of how many users have responded on the bottom right of the slide. If you plan to discuss responses during or at the end of the presentation, leave time for that, too.

Links and Resources