Worthwhile tool for formative assessment or brainstorming
Community Review for Mentimeter
My Take
Overall, even though you can only get two questions for free per mentimeter presentation, this has been sufficient for my use. I love that students use a join code and do not have to create an account. It is advantageous to me as a teacher to be able to sign in with Google. Kids find mentimeter engaging. It works as a tech-rich replacement for any stage of a K-W-L chart. For students who need access to class notes, I can export the mentimeter responses to a PDF and post it to Google Classroom. In this way all students can benefit from revisiting our ideas. My presentations are stored in my account so that I can reuse them. While there aren't a whole lot of options to make the presentations visually appealing, this is secondary for me.
How I Use It
I often use Mentimenter when I want a baseline on what students already know about a subject. Most recently I had students identify what they remember about formatting works cited pages in MLA 8. It is also useful for having kids identify what they know or think they know about a time period, historical figure, philosophy, condition, movement, etc... Granted, you can only gauge the class as a whole; you can’t discern which reponses belong to whom. I like that I can choose the output for kids' responses. When I want a true brainstorm I use speech bubbles. The word cloud option is effective when I am not necessarily looking for unique responses. For example, in having students identify the mood of a passage. The speech bubbles and flowing grid do limit how much you can see on the screen as once, so you are apt to get repeat responses.