Mentimeter | Interact with your audience

Mentimeter is another option for educators as an alternative to purchasing expensive student response systems or ‘clicker’ sets for their classrooms.

Mentimeter is much more simple than Poll Everywhere or Socrative, but I don’t see where you can do anything else with your results beyond displaying them as voting is happening. It remembers your questions, but you can’t export the data to a spreadsheet for later analysis.

It’s attractive, simple to set up and simple for your audience to vote (which can be tough with the other options out there), and you don’t even need to set up an account before you use it. With simplicity comes a cost. There is no option for text-message voting – you can only vote via a web page. So, the simple feature phones that many of your students probably have will not work.

With that in mind, I like it a lot. Give it a try!

Update on November 13, 2013

Mentimeter has been hard at work making their polling platform better and easier to use. I’m very impressed with the work they have done. I think that it’s a perfect tool for teachers and schools, in some circumstances. Its easy to start polling quickly, minimal set up is required, and they have a great new pop-up QR Code feature for each question. If you need to poll a large audience on a school budget (read FREE), there is no better option. Mentimeter allows for an unlimited number of questions and an unlimited number of responses per question with their free account.

They have added the ability to download your poll results, but it’s only available with a paid account. Also, I can’t tell if text/SMS voting is a feature. If it is, it’s only a paid account option. All voting must be done on a web-enabled device. If you need text/SMS voting, Poll Everywhere is still your best bet.

Thanks Mentimeter for providing a great tool for teachers and schools!