New features for Mentimeter in teaching and learning
Mentimeter is Deakin University’s official choice of digital polling software, which enables you to interact with your students synchronously and asynchronously via live polls, quizzes, word clouds, Q&As and more.
Why use Mentimeter in your teaching?
There are many reasons you might want to implement Mentimeter as part of your learning and teaching practice. You might want to increase student engagement, reinforce threshold concepts or create more rapid feedback loops. Mentimeter is also great for creating a sense of cohort, building the skill of self-reflection and for assessment preparation.
Mentimeter enables you to create a learning dialogue between you and your students by engaging them through constructively aligned questions. If you haven’t used Mentimeter for a while, make sure you check out the new interactive question and content slides.
How do you use Mentimeter?
1. Get your license
Deakin has an enterprise-wide license, so if you have Deakin credentials you can get an account. To create an account, please follow these instructions to sign up now. If you already have a free license, you can upgrade to our enterprise-wide license and the extra features by simply clicking ‘Login with SSO’ and following the same instructions as above.
2. Familiarise yourself with Mentimeter
There are many different examples of question types and how they can be presented for teaching and learning, such as the different questions that have been used in a workshop format. If you would like to use any Deakin Mentimeter examples, you can just copy them to your account.
3. Create your presentation
Review the templates and get started creating your first presentation.
4. Share with your teaching teams
You can now create a ‘group’ where you can share templates with your teaching teams so everyone can use the same templates. Visit the Mentimeter help page on how to create groups within your organisation learn more.
Mentimeter is more than multiple choice
It can be tempting to use multiple-choice questions more than others, but there are many other ways you can maximise your use of Mentimeter using a variety of question types, including some great new additions:
· Ice breaker: have you considered using open-ended questions, 100 points, word cloud, or truth or lie? Any of these question types will enable you to learn more about your cohort.
· Stimulate discussion: compliment your existing content by gathering student opinions to generate peer-to-peer discussion
· This or that: provide two options for students to choose from to generate discussion or spark debate.
· Breather: take time to pause and reflect before the next activity or guide the students through a reflection.
· Drumroll: build suspense or create an announcement with a drumroll slide where you can choose the time and volume for your context
· Traffic Lights: gauge students’ feelings or thoughts with a simple traffic light system. Use the same slide across the trimester to gauge how the thoughts/feelings have evolved.
Get started today
If you don’t yet have an account, visit Mentimeter and sign up today using your Deakin credentials.