I have appreciated the time that our principals put into planning back to school meetings that made them innovative. One of our assistant principals used the tool Mentimeter and I instantly fell in love with it! I really liked a lot of the features, and they were easily apply to foreign language classes. Mentimeter is a presentation tool that allows you to interact with all members of your class or audience by using 1:1 devices. Students could use laptops, tablets, or phones. They each log in using the code provided by Mentimeter, and then you can get started! You pace the questions, and the students follow along and reply to your questions. You can also see what students have said because all students sign in.
Mentimeter has some similar features of other presentation tools where you can ask students multiple choice questions or polls. Within the questions, you could include a video or picture to ask a question. You could also allow students to vote on more than one option. Instead of having words for each choice, you could also have students vote from a variety of pictures. This would be fun if you are working with an ideal vacation, houses or even just for paintings or sculptures! While reading a novel, you could have students pick out how they envision the characters from the book. Or who would play each character in a movie adaption!
One of my favorite question types was that you could have students enter individual words on their device, and Mentimeter will display a word cloud on the projector of all of the words combined. As more students enter their words, words that are frequently mentioned appear larger and larger. This would be amazing to brainstorm previous vocabulary to activate before a new unit. You could have students pick out key words from an authentic resource reading or story. Students could also describe characters as well. The possibilities are endless- and it is fun to watch the words appear. Also, they have a profanity filter which is always reassuring.
Another fun feature that I saw on Mentimeter that I haven’t seen on other presentation tools is “who will win.” You can give students multiple choices, and they can vote on who they think will win. Then only the “winner” is displayed with a trophy and some confetti. This would be fun before a big game like the Super Bowl or local sporting events. You could also use this before the big celebrity events like the Latin Grammys. Or at the beginning of the week- everyone could vote on their favorite lunch menu for the week.
Finally, my other favorite feature is that students can react to the slides that you include with type or images. You can choose the reactions that the students can use, but they include a heart, thumbs up, thumbs down, a question mark or a cat (just for fun!) You could have students react to quotes or memes in the target language. You could also have students react with just a question to see if anyone was confused. I would caution you that once the students react, the reaction is animated. If you want students to really focus on the slide, you might want to take off the reactions for that particular slide. But they are fun to include on some slides!
In addition, the program has a variety of typical presentational questions: open-ended questions that display all students’ responses, scales, and quiz questions that provide a question for all students to answer with a countdown timer. However, many of your questions can also include a picture or a video (in Beta) which is awesome for FL classes.
I think that it is pretty intuitive to use, but I wanted to include a few screenshots to get you started. When you log-in, your screen will look like this. You can choose the teal button that says “new presentation.”
The next screen includes all of the different types of slides that you can include in your presentation.
You can choose a theme, and as you create the slides they will appear in the section on the left. Once you choose a specific type of slide such as quiz, you will switch from type to content. Within the content side, you can choose specific settings to that type of question. To get back to the options, you can click on type for question type.
This is the zoomed in version of the quiz questions. Once you are done, you can click on present! I highly encourage you to check out this program! I am excited to integrate it into my classes this year, and I would enjoy hearing how you have used it as well. Edited to add (thanks to Wendy!) on the free plan you could only add two questions per free edition. You could create multiple presentations if you want to add more questions!
