What is Mentimeter?
Mentimeter is an online polling, questioning and voting tool that you can use in your classes or presentations, whether they are face-to-face or online, synchronous or asynchronous. UCL has a site-wide licence for Mentimeter that you can access via your UCL account. To sign up, go to www.mentimeter.com/join/ucl . You can create presentations yourself, or work collaborative with others by sharing your presentation with colleagues at UCL.
Mentimeter falls into the category of applications called Audience Response Systems (ARS) or Electronic Voting Systems (EVS) and they are conceptually simple. The presenter poses a question on the screen, and invites the audience to vote or respond as directed. Once polling closes, everyone can see an aggregated graphic display of the responses. We have long used the TurningPoint voting system at UCL, although this had the drawback of being restricted to certain rooms or requiring handsets to be booked and carried across campus. Mentimeter can be seen as a modern web-based replacement of that system, and can be used whenever and as often as you need.
In 'presenter-pace' mode (the default), the presenter moves the question slides as the participants complete them live - this can be used in a Blackboard Collaborate or Teams session. Mentimeter can also work in 'audience pace' mode, which means that you can set up questions which are completed asynchronously by your student group. So you might for example set a poll to be completed in the early part of the week, and review the outcomes of it at the end of the week. There is a blog post to get you thinking about using Mentimeter, and Dr Silvia Colaiacomo from the UCL Arena Centre has written a case study on the use of Mentimeter for student engagement during asynchronous teaching. You can also find out more about these different modes and watch an introductory video about using Mentimeter.
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Please note: The Mentimeter Add-In for Office365 PowerPoint is not supported at UCL due to technical issues for Mac users, connection difficulties for some users via Single Sign-On (SSO), and limitations in the number of slides and their configurations while using the Add-In. Mentimeter recommends creating presentations on their site and switching between Mentimeter and PowerPoint while presenting. Alternatively, PowerPoint, Keynote or PDF presentations can be imported into Mentimeter. For further guidance, please visit PowerPoint plugin and integrations. |
What can Mentimeter do?
An ARS can be a very powerful teaching and learning tool. It may be used for:
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| - Diagnostic testing: find out what your students already know.
- Contingent teaching: use the results of polls to change your teaching plans to deliver exactly what the audience needs.
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| - Promoting group discussion: poll and ask for feedback on why different responses were chosen.
- Peer instruction: Encourage students to discuss questions and collectively agree on an answer.
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All of these uses have one common purpose: encouraging students or participants to be actively thinking about the subject being discussed or presented. For an overview of what makes Mentimeter powerful, read Martin Compton's blog post giving 5 reasons why Mentimeter works so well.
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Mentimeter Essentials| Panel |
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| See what questions you can ask your audience and learn how to best use them. |
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| Learn what is possible to do when presenting with Mentimeter. |
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| Digital Education Blog post with an overview of what it can do and how it's been used at UCL. |
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Ideas for using Mentimeter| Panel |
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| Read through those articles to prepare and execute your presentations like a star! |
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| Prepare your polling by anticipating what your audience will experience. |
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| Export, share or analyse the data after your presentation. |
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| Find answers to the most common Mentimeter questions. |
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Getting Help
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Want to talk about using voting and polling in teaching?
If you're a member of staff and would like to discuss how you can use Mentimeter in your teaching practice, please contact the Digital Education team: digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk