Increase Large Class Engagement with Mentimeter Polling

Engaging students in a 100-person class during a 2-hour lecture period and periodically checking their understanding is critical for student learning. Audience response systems (e.g., “clickers”) have offered a quick, simple way to achieve engagement at scale. Tools like Mentimeter not only help increase classroom engagement, it also immensely helps the instructor and the students to gauge their content delivery and level of understanding respectively, most importantly, in real time. 

Polling tools are generally used to solicit anonymous, quick responses to questions displayed on a projector, which students can answer from a phone or computer. Everyone can see responses in real time, or the instructor can reveal responses once all have been submitted. While there are several polling tools such as iClickers, Kahoot, and Poll Everywhere, some of these come at a cost or have limited capacities and question formats. Mentimeter has gained popularity as providing easy mobile and computer options with fewer limitations than similar tools.

We can be creative and take advantage of a wide variety of question types and real-time results to get our students engaged in a collaborative presentation. Here are a few ways on how to use Mentimeter during your team meetings or teaching and learning activities.

• Icebreaker
• Brainstorming
• Pre-work or Asynchronous Activity
• Opinion Poll
• Think-Pair-Share
• Back Channeling
• Reflection/Feedback
• Formative Quiz/Knowledge Test

When using the basic version, there may be limitations to how many questions go in each of the presentations (created in Mentimeter); however, there are no limits on the number of presentations and there are also a variety of question formats available. 

If you want to incorporate Menti questions directly on your lecture PowerPoint slides, there is an option of having a QR code or a voting link which can be used by the students and it would take them directly to the menti question. The QR code and the voting link would remain the same for the entire presentation. The weblinks for more information on how to use menti questions can be found under the References and Resources section below. 

References and Resources

• Mentimeter Info
• Share QR Code - Mentimeter
• Let Your Audience Connect to the Presentation via a Link - Mentimeter
• Create an Interactive Mentimeter Quiz
• Engaging Your Audience with Mentimeter Polls
• Mentimeter- An Easy Way to Create Interactive Polls and Presentations
• Mentimeter Polling: Overview from UWE Bristol

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About the Author

Subha Bhaskaran is a Special Instructor in the Biological Sciences Department at OU. She loves teaching Human Physiology as it is always fascinating to talk about how our body functions in many ways we can’t imagine! Outside of the classroom, she volunteers at OUCARES and Nunmaan Tamil Academy.

Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC. 

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