Unlocking Interactive Presentations with Mentimeter: Engage Your Students like Never Before!

Hello, everyone, long time no see! Did you miss me? 

I guess you already know the protagonist of this post from the title Ha-ha:) 🤩Yes, it is Mentimeter. 

If you are tired of delivering boring lectures that fail to capture students’ attention or wish to make your classroom presentations more interactive and engaging, NOW, with Mentimeter, it’s time to say goodbye to monotony and hello to interactive presentations! 

📍What is Mentimeter?

Simple speaking, Mentimeter is an interactive presentation tool, which allows students to participate, contribute and collaborate in the presentation using their own devices. Specifically, they can take a poll, do a quiz or create a word cloud and see the results animated in real time.

👂Want to give it a try? Click here.

Screenshot from Mentimeter

📍Why Mentimeter?

• Have fun with real-time interaction

One of the standout features of Mentimeter is the ability to create interactive activities such as live polling and entertaining quizzes. Trust me, these activities have the magical power to drag your students back to class from scrolling their phones 📱 or daydreaming 😴.

• Easy-to-build presentations

Mentimeter offers a range of presentation templates to help you get started. These templates are customizable so you can add your own content and design to them. This is useful if you are short of time and need to create a presentation quickly.

• Give every student a voice

Imagine you are teaching in a large class of over 30 students, it is IMPOSSIBLE to pay attention to every single student. Often, the voices of students who are relatively introverted, sitting in the corner or at the back of the classroom, are ignored by the teacher. Mentimeter makes it possible for everyone's ideas 💡to be displayed on the screen, rather than only the loudest students’ ideas being heard.

📍How can we use Mentimeter?

I’ m going to introduce you one of the features of Mentimeter that I use most frequently in my presentations, that is, dynamic word clouds ☁️. (Tips: Click on the image and discover more features!)

Screenshot from Mentimeter

👀Look at the picture on the left, this is how word clouds looks like. 

The bigger the word, the more people have submitted this answer. This function is often used to collect students' ideas in brainstorming activities.

After understanding the features of Mentimeter, there are three main ways to use it with PowerPoint:

A. Create presentations directly in Mentimeter 

B. Import PowerPoint presentations to Mentimeter

C. Import Mentimeter Presentations to PowerPoint 

🦋 Don't know how to do it? Don't worry, this video will help you🦋

📍Any limitations?

• Potential risk of distraction: When students join Mentimeter with their devices, they will inevitably see other information such as game updates or gossip…

• Concerns about loss of freshness: The first time you use it, students may think 'wow, that's amazing!'; the second time you use it, they think 'oh, that's nice.' ....... So, when students become accustomed to Mentimeter, will it still be attractive? 

• Paid subscription to get more features: With the free plan, you can only access up to 2 question slides and 5 quiz slides and cannot import presentations or export results to Excel.

📍Conclusion

Overall, Mentimeter can be a useful tool for engaging and interacting with students. Just provide them with a code number or QR code and you can make everything interesting!