Mentimeter

Mentimeter allows you to easily (very easily) create and launch live, interactive polls, surveys and quizzes and create cool things like wordclouds in real time. It has a really smooth mobile integration through the use of QR codes which is a killer feature in the modern age. We have frequently had "wow moments" in meetings, workshops and training sessions using Mentimeter as people see animated quiz standing come in in real time and the like. Zero learning curve from the users point of view and almost frictionless.

It has a few limitations that make it less slick from the point of view of the person using it compared to the people answering the questions. It does not integrate well with Powerpoint. There is an outdated and never updated plug in which crashes all the time and thus unusable. The other option is to import your slides into Mentimeter and do the whole thing from there. This is not always advisable because animations are not preserved and the general look of the slides suffers.

Without PPT integration, if you are running a remote session using Zoom or similar you are forcing people to navigate away from your window to use Mentimeter and then relying on them coming back to see the results come in in real time. It damages the experience tremendously. You get around this by showing QR codes and having them do it on their phones, but still, not ideal.

Another issue is that moving or otherwise adjusting slide shows inside Mentimeter is a huge pain. Drag and drop to change the order of slides is basically broken, so me and my team always make sure everything is in order before importing (if we even use importing, see above). Even a no-integrated session with more than a few Mentimeter slides is a huge pain to adjust.

Finally, although they claim that switching between say PPT and Mentimeter on the fly is easy, it inhibits you from easily and smoothly moving to the next question. Not ideal.

What I like about mentimeter is that it really gives an opportunity to the teacher to make the session fun. Since we are in a pandemic here in the Philippines, our main means of teaching is through online classes. That's why in these times, there are applications that will make the class active, engaging, and not boring, one of them is mentimeter. Together with out creativity, we can have games or any activities that are relevant to the pupils using polls, surveys, quizzes, etc. that their answer can be seen real time. Which means that it can be a form of formative assessment since it is an opportunity for us to give an immediate feedback to some mistakes the students are able to do.

What I like the least about this software is the limited questions and quizzes per presentation. However, I think that this gives us the opportunity to be resourceful. If I will be given an opportunity to have something to recommend in their company, I'll them that there must be a way where they will be giving a discount for students. It will be very helpful especially to education majors.