Die Verwendung von Mentimeter in der Hochschullehre

Autorin: Karen Dennis

In this month´s article Karen shares her experience of working with Mentimeter.

Firstly, I would like to start by saying that I am by no means a Mentimeter expert, having used it on only two courses so far.  Will I use it again?  Possibly.

The advantages as I saw them were

• setting up a presentation is really intuitive.
• as an English trainer I found the “open ended” slide useful.  This is where students can type a word or phrase in response to a question or statement.  These responses are then displayed on the screen for everyone to see.  Of course, this can also be done on padlet for example, but I preferred the visuals and the closer connection Mentimeter gives you to the students.
• Initial thoughts about a topic can be collected on a word cloud or by asking students to rank options. This provides an interesting way of introducing a new topic.
• There is a wide range of free images to add to the slides and adding video to the presentation is very simple.
• Slides can be downloaded as a pdf

So why is mentimeter not my “go-to” tool for lesson slides?

• The number of question slides (such as the word cloud) and quiz slides is limited.  I tried to get around this by creating a new presentation for every lesson in the course.  However, the direction an English lesson takes is often spontaneous and I found that I would want to jump to something in another presentation.  All in all, I found it rather hard to keep the presentations in line with the flow of the lessons.  Obviously this disadvantage would be removed if you took a subscription.

In summary, the features are great to encourage audience interaction, but the limit on the number of these slides introduces inflexibility in the planning of lessons.  When planning my next course I will bear Mentimeter in mind but can probably achieve the same learning experience using Powerpoint and Quizizz.

ÜBER DIE AUTORIN

Frau Dennis ist eine selbstständige Englisch-Trainerin und Steuerberaterin nach Englischem Recht. Ihre Berufslaufbahn begann sie bei KPMG London, worauf sie anschließend in die Pharmaindustrie wechselte. In diesen Unternehmen hatte sie verschiedene Positionen im Finanzbereich inne (Reporting Accountant, UK GAAP und IFRS, Business Accountant). Als selbstständige Trainerin lebt sie seit 2006 in Graz und lehrt „Business English“.