Overview
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.
Mentimeter offers a wide range of support around the tool, including but not limited to:
Additionally, Digital Education at the University of Plymouth also offers various services and support about the tool, such as:
- Help resources
- Blog articles
- Self-directed courses
- Demonstration example
- Webinars
- Training / workshops with the Digital Education Team (Email link)
Mentimeter Webinar (Basic Level)
Mentimeter recently held a webinar about the basic features of the tool. During the first part of this webinar, they emphasised its power, such as:
- It is a great tool to be used for gathering valuable input from students
- It improves learning outcomes, just as student engagement and satisfaction
- It facilitates active learning journeys for students
- It is a safe space for everyone to be heard
They also highlighted the recent research they conducted with Emotiv which is a bioinformatics company that uses special devices to carry out brain studies. This study’s results outlined that during the presentation by using Mentimeter:
- 15% of students paid more attention
- 13% of students were more engaged
For more information about the research, please visit their blog and case study website.
Available Content Types
Additionally, Mentimeter also demonstrated some of the available content types by planning interactive tasks for the audience. This included:
- Multiple-Choice
- Ranking
- Scales
- Traffic Light
- Open-ended questions
To get a full review of all the available content types, please visit our help resources. To get a better understanding of how to use these content types for collaboration and interaction, please visit our blog articles. To understand the difference between the content types of Mentimeter, H5P, and Microsoft PowerPoint, please click here.
They also demonstrated managing results of a Mentimeter presentation, including producing data-driven analytics and exporting these results to alternative formats for further analytics.
Edit Mode
During the webinar, educators could also gain insight into the edit mode of a Mentimeter presentation, which included:
- Creating new slides
- Configuring the presentation settings (including using Mentimeter for live sessions or as surveys by using the ‘Audience-pace’ feature)
- Translating the content into different languages
- Using the Profanity filter to filter out inappropriate words entered by students as responses, for example for Open-Ended questions
- Sharing presentations for:
- participation using QR codes, URL links, or Mentimeter codes (designed for student usage)
- collaboration (designed for colleague usage)
- review of results and importing presentations to other Mentimeter accounts (designed for colleague usage)
New Features
Mentimeter also introduced a couple of new features that have been released recently, such as:
- Reactions designed for participants which can be a heart, a thumbs up and down, a question, or a cat icon – these can be enabled/disabled on each slide
- Different layouts in the edit mode, including tabs, such as:
- ‘Content’ where the slide content type has to be added to the presentation
- ‘Design’ where the slide design can be customised, such as content layout, text alignment, color and size, visualisation colors, and background images
- ‘Interactivity’ where the slide reactions can be selected
- ‘Templates’ where different pre-designed slide or presentation templates can be used depending on the content
- Mentimeter plugin which now can be used in Zoom and Microsoft Teams
FAQ
During the webinar, there were plenty of opportunities given to the audience to ask questions from Mentimeter. This includes common questions, such as:
- Adding images to content types of presentations
- Copyright policies around images embedded into Mentimeter which is fed by Unsplash.
- Displaying response results in percentage or absolute numbers, for example, for multiple-choices
For more common questions, please visit the help resources and courses Mentimeter and Digital Education of the University of Plymouth actively manage.
Next Webinar (Advanced Level)
Mentimeter recently introduced a series of webinar sessions where at different times of the year, they will provide webinars about Mentimeter, covering different aspects of the tool. The next webinar will be held on the 9th of November 2023 which will cover the advanced level features and best practices for improving learning outcomes, however, we highly encourage our staff to attend the webinar even if they have never or only on rare occasions they have had the chance to use the tool.
To sign up for the session, please visit Mentimeter’s official website. For any questions regarding the tool, please contact Digital Education.