Mentimeter

MENTIMETER

"We want people to stop thinking about presentation and start focusing on interaction. That’s the fundamental shift from how most meetings between people are carried out today and how we want to see it in the future." – Mentimeter

Mentimeter can transform a boring lecture into an interactive learning experience. I love using it as an opener or summarizer activity or for a check for understanding. My students love using it to display their knowledge, interests and anonymously showing their level of understanding on a given topic.

OVERVIEW

Mentimeter allows you to set up an online poll that you can display in front of your students. Students can respond using any internet connected device. Polling is simple, anonymous and instantaneous.

COST
Free (Some advanced features require a premium subscription of $99/month)

KEY FEATURES

• Student Engagement: Students love to respond and see their answers displayed on the board. How would you like to be sitting at a conference with the option to show your response to a question posed by the presenter? Would you feel more engaged? Like you contributed to what was learned during the presentation?
• Formative Assessment: Can you imagine asking a question and knowing immediately what your audience thinks? Mentimeter is amazingly simple, visual and powerful way to check for student's understanding at the beginning, end and throughout a lesson. 
• Differentiation: By making a check for understanding quick and easy you can quickly modify lessons to address different groups of students. I've noticed with some of my questions that many students are on the right track, but a small group might need extra help. It's easy to say "Red group, come meet me in the back for a little mini lesson, while the rest of the class gets started". 
• Real Time Data: As students vote, their results are immediately displayed on the screen. It's fun for students to watch as their vote gets cast. It's fun for teachers to watch as students try to convince one another why their answer is correct. 
• Quick and Easy: Questions can be set up in less than a minute. The set up is simple and creates a simple but beautiful product. It is also simple for students to use so you don't have to worry about a walk through of how to use the tool with your students. Not 1:1? Mentimeter works on any internet connected device. Students can use cell phones, tablets, laptops, iPods, etc. to submit their answers.
• Link Multiple Questions: If you know you'll be using Mentimeter multiple times in a lesson or period, you can link questions together so that students don't have to sign in again. Once they complete your first question, they will be told to wait until you project the next question in the series.

IMPROVEMENTS

• Downloadable Results: Downloadable results are only available for the premium version. I find myself often taking screenshots with Jing or printing the page to a pdf. 
• iOS/Android App: Although the website works well for mobile, it seems that this software could be easily run on an app, it's a shame they haven't created an app for it yet.
• Individual Data: While it's nice that the site doesn't require a login, it also makes it so everything is anonymous, whether you want it that way or not. This tool cannot be used to collect data about individual students and used to differentiate a learning plan for a student. It does, however, work wonderfully for choosing homogeneous groups to differentiate collaborative lessons.

Click here for Mentimeter's Inspiration for Teachers site for more ideas on how to use Mentimeter.