Best Practice in Mentimeter

Getting organised

• You can use folders to keep your presentations organised, e.g. by subject or session. 
• Your audience should be reminded to bring their smartphones or smart devices to the presentation so they can vote. However, remember that participation cannot be made mandatory. 
• If you are making large changes to a presentation, it is best to duplicate it before you start. There’s no ‘Undo’ button for Mentimeter. 
• Use the content slides in Mentimeter to provide any context for a question so that you will not need to leave the Mentimeter presentation screen during a presentation.  
• Do not set questions in a manner that the audience need to use two different screens, e.g. looking at information on one screen and responding to polls or questions on another. 

Privacy and Terms of Use 

• Provide your audience with the Privacy notice and Terms of use before the presentation. 
• You can copy the ‘UTS User Documents’ template from the ‘Shared templates’ folder in your Mentimeter dashboard and make it available to your audience at the beginning of your presentation.  
• Personal information collected may be stored outside of NSW or Australia by the Contractor. So, it is important that your audience is aware of these before providing any personal information (e.g. email address to receive presentation results by email). 

When you start presenting 

• Provide multiple ways for the audience to access the activity, e.g. voting code, hyperlink or QR code for your audience to connect with your presentation. In online presentations you can share the voting hyperlink through chat. Also read out the voting code and ‘menti.com’ URL. 
• Allow some time for the audience as they connect their device. 
• Mentimeter provides real time results and feedback. Make sure the value proposition of the activity is clear to your audience.  
• If appropriate, you can use an icebreaker at the beginning. Ask an easy question to get everyone engaged in your presentation from the start to generate some laughs, find out more about your audience, help them understand how the process works or set the tone for your presentation.

During the presentation 

• If running a ‘Presenter pace’ presentation, make sure you allow enough time for your audience to answer questions that you have included in the presentation. Attendees with English as their second language may need more time to process information. Problems might occur when the teacher selects the next question, but students have not yet finished answering. 
• Something not working right? Hit refresh, even if you’re in the middle of a presentation.  
• In cases where your audience can be influenced by each other’s answers, you can hide the results on all question slides and show results manually after each question or after the voting ends. You can toggle between show and hide results by pressing ‘H’ during a presentation. 
• Spend some time after each question going through and commenting on the results. 
• If you allow comments and questions from the audience, then acknowledge these and try to respond to them as much as possible. If you run out of time, then assure your audience that you would respond to those questions in another way. We recommend collating the questions into a document and uploading this to a Canvas subject site. 

Making it all accessible 

• Share the voting URL (the page the audience uses to vote) in every presentation via the Zoom/MS Teams chat; this means it can be accessed directly via the web browser by students who rely on using a screen reader because it is keyboard operable.  
• Use the UTS default theme – it has the colour contrast adjusted so that most users with colour vision deficiency are supported.  
• Always have clear instructions for students that have language barriers. Refer to the LX guide on Language: accessible practice. 
• Narrate what is on screen for participants whose visual experience is different; this is achieved by narrating the activities and guiding users through what can be seen on screen.  Read out the voting code and URL, and describe what is on the screen, using detailed descriptions of images and how the activities are unfolding.   
• It is recommended that you provide alternative text for images in the ‘human friendly image description’ field for audience using screen-reading software. Refer to the Alternative text: accessible practice guide for writing meaningful alternative text. 
• Advise on the actual meaning of the information being presented to screen readers when curating question types, such as rankings, so that students have a clear understanding about how to order the different options presented on the screen. 
• Use ways of referring to charts other than by their colours for students that have colour vision deficiency. For instance, various heights and sizes of the charts and numeric values to differentiate them. 
• If you need to export the results to an excel file and share them, make sure to create accessible Excel documents. 

Using Mentimeter with Canvas 

• You can use Mentimeter in asynchronous activities by embedding the presentation in a Canvas page and setting the navigation to ‘Audience pace.’  
• Make sure to show clear voting instruction on the presentation slides so the audience can vote. 
• It is a good practice to share the synchronous Mentimeter session by embedding it in a Canvas page after closing voting and hiding voting code on the slides. Some Students who might have missed the session can revisit the activities and benefit from the poll questions and results. 

Moderation 

• Free text response to Q&A slide and audience questions can be moderated. For a large audience, you might appoint someone to help with moderation.
• Remember that open-ended, word cloud, type answer and audience comments cannot be moderated. If you have any concerns, avoid using these questions.