Measure their Minds with Mentimeter

Last week I presented at my district's Blended Learning Conference. I had seen a blurb about Mentimeter, so I tried it out. I liked it a lot (details below) and will definitely use it again!

Mentimeter captured my interest right away because it offers question types that I haven't seen with a lot of other formative assessment tools. In addition to the standard multiple-choice type questions, mentimeter offers word cloud creation and sliding scales and a 2x2 matrix. I love a 2x2 matrix! Here are the question types:

After you log in to your account, you create a "presentation." The presentation consists of the questions you will ask. My presentation was just a quick poll at the beginning of my session about web tools we all use to bolster our own professional development. I started with the word cloud question you see above and followed up with the sliding scale question below:

At the session, it was very easy to launch. Click the name of the presentation and you are provided with a link and code to share with your audience. Participants join by going to the link and entering the code. The presenter has the option of presenting the questions at the presenter's pace or the audience's pace and whether or not to share the audience responses as they come in.

It's a little hard to see in the image above, but I liked an almost hidden feature of the sliding scale question. The number in the circles above represents the average score for each tool. When you hover on a particular tool, you can see a wave plot of how many people chose each of the values on the scale. I thought that was really slick!

Start to finish - from create the questions to launch - took me only about 15 minutes. I spent more time thinking about and deciding from among the cool question types than I did setting everything up. There is a free plan that allows for unlimited audience size (great for big groups) and the tool works on any device - smart phone, tablet, or computer. I thought mentimeter was a fresh look at formative assessment. Definitely worth a look!