Infoshare - TCEA 2012 - mentimeter

  Recently the Instructional Technology Team, along with a group of other teachers from Bryan ISD, attended the TCEA (Texas Computer Educators Association) conference in Austin, TX. We attended presentations and workshops led by other teachers from across the state to learn about the new and exciting ways that technology is being used in the classroom. This week in our posts we will share many of the things we learned at TCEA with you.

Hanging out with Mobi from BrainPop in the Convention Center at TCEA.

  I'd like to share a resource from a course I attended about using mobile devices in the classroom. Although the course focused on the use of student cell phones, this resource could also be used on COW laptops, iPads, or iPod touches.

MENTIMETER.COM
Mentimeter is a site that allows teachers to quickly and easily poll their students.

Here's what makes Mentimeter so great for the classroom:

• It's free!
• Teachers do not have to install any software or register/sign in to the site to ask a question - just go to mentimeter.com and type in a question.
• There is no limit to the amount of students who can be polled or the amount of questions that can be created.
• To answer a question, students type a simple URL into their browser (or scan a QR code) - no log in required.
• Students can only answer a question once per device - if they try to answer twice, they are told that they have already answered that question.
• Responses are displayed in real time for teachers to project from their computer (teachers also have the options to hide the results until everyone has voted).

Classroom Integration Ideas:

• Poll your students periodically throughout the lesson to keep them engaged while simultaneously gaining feedback for yourself about class mastery as a whole.
• Ask the same question at the beginning and end of a lesson, and let students compare the results to see what they learned.
• When teaching about graphing, math teachers could poll their students and use the results as an example of a bar graph.