Webwatcher: Mentimeter

With Covid-19 still a reality, many of us are still teaching fully online, while others may have gone back to classroom teaching, possibly with reduced class sizes. So I have been looking at tools that have value both in an online teaching context and also if you are teaching face to face.

Mentimeter (www.mentimeter.com)

Mentimeter has been around for quite a while. It is a useful tool for building an element of interaction into your presentations or explanations. Basically, it allows you to share questions and activities with an audience, and they can respond by either using a smartphone or any computer-type device. The range of activities is very varied and includes word clouds, multiple-choice questions, short-answer voting, collecting opinions and ranking things in a particular order. The interesting thing about the activity types is that they have a few useful additions that other tools don’t offer. For example, in the word cloud activity, the students can key in multiple answers and if you are collecting opinions, the resulting information can be displayed in several different ways.

In the free version of Mentimeter, you can make as many activities as you want. Mentimeter calls these ‘presentations’, and within each presentation you can have a maximum of three questions.

The good thing about it is that the students’ responses are generated instantly, so it is a great tool to encourage interaction and check that your students are following you. You get instant information, which you can then display to the class on a projector or share via ‘screen share’ if you are teaching online.

Using Mentimeter

1 Flipped classroom

I often use Mentimeter as part of a flipped classroom lesson. So if, for example, I have asked my students to watch a short video for homework and to take notes on it, I can start my lesson by asking them to share their ideas about the video and perhaps answer a few questions. I simply share these on Mentimeter and the students can respond using any device. I can then use the information generated to do some related activities. For example, I might ask the students to use the information to write a short sypnosis of the video, to read the responses and choose the best ones, or even to use the information as the inspiration for an essay.

2 Checking understanding

When I am teaching online, I like to have several key moments in which I check the students’ understanding. A lot of the informal information (eg from the students’ expressions and gestures) that we normally pick up in a face-to-face class can be lost in online teaching. This information often helps us to see whether the students understand the material or not, how well they are working in groups, etc. Because we can’t see everything that is going on online, we need to include some activities that not only get the students involved but also help us to understand how much of the lesson they are absorbing. Mentimeter is perfect for this. We can create questions and, at key moments in the lesson, ask the students to respond. We receive instant feedback and this helps to build a picture of what the class is taking in.

3 Student-generated materials

This is a great tool to introduce your students to, as it is completely free and very easy to use. The students can work in groups and create small quizzes and activities for other groups to do. These activities can even be set for homework. In most cases, I use Mentimeter for instant feedback in the lesson, but it is possible to get the students to do the activities at home. The questions in a Mentimeter activity remain ‘live’ for two days, unless the teacher or the student who created the activity closes it.

4 Accessing questions

When you create a Mentimeter activity, all you have to do to allow your students to access it is to click on the ‘Share’ button, copy the access link and send it to them. This is perfect if you are teaching online, as you can share the link in the chat window of tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. If you are actually in the classroom, it is also very easy. Each presentation you create (remember: a presentation is just a serious of questions) has a code. You can ask your students to go to Menti.com and put in the code. The questions will instantly appear on their screens and they can answer them. All the data are immediately sent back to the teacher.

I really like Mentimeter. It has a nice mix of question types, which means you can vary the activities that you create. It is ideal for gauging the opinions of your class or audience, but also excellent for quickly checking understanding.