Transform your teaching and the student learning experience with quick, easy to use, interactive elements.

Collaborative learning in face-to-face, online, hybrid, or blended classrooms can take several forms and shapes, such as discussions, sharing ideas, Q&A sessions, peer-to-peer learning, project productions, and other interactive tasks in pairs, groups, or whole classes where you can actively engage your students. This can lead to higher student performance as a positive correlation between collaboration and learning outcomes can be seen evidenced in research, such as Collaborative Learning Techniques where Barkley, Major, and Cross (2014)

“identified some of the benefits of collaborative learning, which include increased student engagement, persistence, and personal development, as well as improved achievement across a wide range of students (p. 23-7).”

Columbia (CTL): Center for Teaching and Learning

Collaboration can also help with building communities, preventing your students from feeling isolated or disconnected, and would also provide the opportunity to share ownership and responsibility. Creating a collaborative learning space allows students to get a wider understanding of a topic from various aspects, whilst working together as a team. This can also help your students with their future journey in terms of employability and other social situations.

So what would be the best tool to use for collaborative learning?

As there is a wide range of tools that can be used for this purpose, we would recommend choosing the one that would be the closest to your preferences and expectations.

Of these technologies, we would like to highlight Mentimeter as it is supported by the University of Plymouth and it is a commonly used tool amongst educators due to its ease of use and speed of rich, engaging, and accessible content creation.

It is also a mobile-friendly tool, therefore, students can use different devices to view the content and complete the tasks you have created for them. This is also an essential condition of online learning as one of its key objectives is to be able to ‘learn anytime and anywhere’.

What is Mentimeter?

Mentimeter is a cloud-based polling tool to interact with students through presentations in real-time using a mobile phone or other device connected to the internet. Mentimeter visualises the response data from participants which can be displayed live but it can also be hidden until all students have submitted a response.

For more information about the tool, please visit their website.

Benefits

Mentimeter has many great benefits, such as:

• simple and user-friendly interface, therefore, even users who have no previous experience with this kind of tool could learn to optimally use it in a quick and easy way;
• unlimited class size, therefore, you can interactively use it during your live sessions with hundreds of students;
• unlimited presentations, therefore, you can design as many presentations for your students as you would like to;
• variety of questions types, therefore, it can be used within each discipline with a variety of tasks included in the presentations; and
• increases participation by involving students in the discussion and contributes to collaborative working, which then would help to build an online community during the live sessions.

What do people think about Mentimeter?

You can find a lot of useful reviews about Mentimeter, where people, including academics, share their opinion about the usage and their experience of the tool. For example, on a company’s website called Software Advice, you can find reviews from various aspects from people all around the world, working in different industries, including Education Management.

An anonymised user stated:

“I really enjoy utilizing the integration of real-time polls and feedback mid-presentation. We have used Mentimeter, primarily making use of the poll feature, to gauge both student and advisor feedback and understanding. We have been able to pull the reports the gather additional data to share with our team. Whether for students or for staff, Mentimeter has been incredibly useful and allows anonymization of data, allowing us to see where things are succeeding and perhaps where things can be given a bit more clarity.”

Anonymised user (Industry: Higher Education, Company size: 10,000+ Employees)

Another one said:

“Being able to interact with viewers instantly makes this software more eye-catching than competitors such as Microsoft, simply because of this innovation has allowed Mentimeter to be a clear choice when someone wants to measure how attentive their audience is and make the viewer feel that they are being heard.”

Christopher (Industry: Education Management, Company size: 10,000+ Employees)

An academic, Martha Martinez has also shared her opinion related to the tool as she used it for her class AEP800.

How to create a Mentimeter presentation?

If you have not used Mentimeter before, please visit the following articles in order to get more information about how to create your first presentation with the tool.

• How to create your first presentation, including adding slides, using templates, and presenting it to your students?
• How to configure the relevant settings for your presentation?
• How to preview your presentation?
• What are the available content types for a presentation?
• How to check accessibility for your presentation?
• Tips before and during your presentation

We also built a DLE course around using Mentimeter, which is available here.

To access all the available supporting materials about Mentimeter, please visit our Knowledge Base.

How to get the most out of Mentimeter?

There are many useful articles about getting the most out of the tool to fully engage students where we are highlighting a few of them:

• Basic tips about creating and presenting a Mentimeter presentation
• Basic tips about a Mentimeter presentation from an education perspective
• Tips and tricks about a Mentimeter presentation from a designer perspective
• Tips to boost your presentation skills using Mentimeter
• Tips to make your Mentimeter presentation more interactive
• Advanced tips about a Mentimeter presentation from a designer perspective
• Tips about running effective meetings using a Mentimeter presentation
• Tips about running successful Q&A sessions using a Mentimeter presentation

We also designed a Mentimeter presentation for demonstration purposes for the academic staff, which is available here.

If you have any questions regarding Mentimeter presentations, including improving content, please contact Digital Education

What is Mentimeter Academy?

Mentimeter Academy has been designed for Mentimeter users to improve their presentation skills through the courses the company has designed where they can learn the basics of the tool with the help of experts. After each course, you are given a completion certificate.

The courses aim to allow you to:

• build well-designed presentations that would be interactive and engaging,
• become a great presenter by establishing a better connection with your audience, and
• gather feedback from your audience, which you can use later on for improving your future presentations.

In addition, they also provide monthly Q&A sessions which are live webinars with the instructors and other users who also participate in one of these courses.

For more information about their courses, please visit the following supporting material.

Will there be a training or demonstration session provided to staff?

Digital Education organised a training/demonstration session which will take place on the 7th of December, where all staff members are welcome. The session will be held by Mentimeter where you will also have the chance to ask any questions you might have or provide feedback on the tool.

To get all the details about the sessions, please contact Digital Education.