Activities in Mentimeter

Icebreaker

Mentimeter can be an excellent icebreaker tool at the beginning of any presentation, or you can use it to break up a long session and help with transition between activities or topics. You can ask an easy question to help your audience get started, get to know one another, and generate some laughs. This will help them understand how the Mentimeter process works as you get everyone engaged in your presentation from the start and set the tone for your presentation. You can: 

• use easy multiple choice or ranking questions 
• be reflective with open ended question or word cloud
• be creative by using the pin on image question

Question types you can use for this activity: Multiple Choice, Scales, Ranking, 100 points, 2 x 2 Grid, Who will win?, Pin on image, Word cloud, Open Ended, Q&A

Diagnostic knowledge test

You can use Mentimeter to find out what your students know and whether they are keeping up with the learning activities or doing pre-work.  The anonymous participation makes student feel safe when they express how much they know and what they think.  You can use a mix of different question types to bring variation into learning activities.

Question types you can use for this activity: Multiple Choice, Scales, Ranking, 100 points, 2 x 2 Grid, Who will win?, Pin on image, Word cloud, Open Ended

Formative quiz

A Mentimeter quiz can be a great option to run formative quizzes to warm up your students before an assessment or create a healthy competition and inject fun in your regular teaching and learning activities. This also provides opportunity to provide feedback and reinforce critical and important knowledge. Please note that you cannot use Mentimeter for grading any summative assessment task.

Question types you can use for this activity: Select answer, Type answer

Opinion poll

You can use a Mentimeter poll to survey your audience and form opinions. Everyone in the audience gets a voice and feels included with the opportunity to safely express their opinion in an anonymous and non-verbal way. Gauging opinion can be challenging for large live audiences, but Mentimeter provides real-time results making it easier to understand the audience opinion.  

Question types you can use for this activity: Multiple Choice, Scales, Ranking, 100 points, 2 x 2 Grid, Who will win?, Pin on image, Word cloud, Open Ended

Reflection

You can facilitate reflection using Mentimeter by asking open ended reflective question and prompting your audience to provide their responses. You can share the collective reflection and follow up if appropriate. Individuals cannot be identified for follow up, but it can be an excellent group-based activity.

Question types you can use for this activity: Word cloud, Open Ended, Q&A

Feedback on your teaching

You can ask your students to provide feedback on your teaching or learning materials and activities using Mentimeter. Students can provide instant feedback while their learning experience is still fresh in memory. You can find out what is working, what needs to be improved, and what should be changed by using a Mentimeter poll. 

Question types you can use for this activity: Multiple Choice, Scales, Ranking, Word cloud, Open Ended, Q&A

Back channelling

You can use Mentimeter’s Q&A slide for back channelling, where students post their questions in real-time as you progress through your lecture. By using this feature, students can post question anonymously and fellow students can up-vote questions that are important to them. In this way you would not get interrupted with your planned delivery of content and you can pause at regular intervals, or at the end, to answer the questions. This way you can make your lectures streamlined and consistent with space for students to ask questions without disruption to learning activities. 

Question types you can use for this activity: Open Ended, Q&A

Think-Pair-Share

The Think-Pair-Share active learning strategy just got easier with Mentimeter. You can use activities as a warmup activity before teaching a new topic or before a whole class discussion. You can then pair students and ask them to privately discuss a question or topic and report as a group to the whole class using Mentimeter. In online classes you can send each pair of students into a breakout room. Sharing ideas with a partner before reporting to the whole class boosts confidence and leads to meaningful engagement when the question or topic is further discussed with the whole class.   

Question types you can use for this activity: Word cloud, Open Ended

Brainstorming 

Mentimeter can also be useful during a brainstorming session. You can pose questions to your team members or students using open ended and word cloud question types to collect their idea. This can also be done as a group work activity to enhance collaboration and group work experience. You can create small groups in a face-to-face meeting or use break out rooms in case of online meetings so each group can privately discuss and provide responses.

Question types you can use for this activity: Word cloud, Open Ended, Q&A

Pre-work or asynchronous activity

Mentimeter can help with setting up pre work or another asynchronous activity on Canvas. You can embed your questionnaire on a Canvas page as an audience pace Mentimeter presentation so that students can complete it on their own time. You can then pull up these original Mentimeter question slides to find out how your students went in the activity, and even go as far to run the questions again and compare the answers after the class.

Question types you can use for this activity: Multiple Choice, Scales, Ranking, 100 points, 2 x 2 Grid, Who will win?, Pin on image, Word cloud, Open Ended