Case study: Using Mentimeter for 'flipped' workshops in Biology

Department of Biology
Gareth Evans

Gareth Evans describes how he uses Mentimeter within a regular pattern of activities in workshops to support a flipped learning approach. This involves a review and self-assessment activity connected to short online recordings and related materials released prior to each session. This is then followed by a Q&A, a knowledge check, and a group practice activity with discussion and feedback. He outlined the structure of the weekly sessions and how, at each stage, Mentimeter provides efficient ways to: - elicit student questions - support and encourage self-assessment and reflection - review core underpinning knowledge and provide feedback and further input as required - share outcomes of student group work and provide feedback.

Watch their presentation:

Using Mentimeter for 'flipped' workshops in Biology (Panopto viewer) (3 mins 42 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hi, I'm going to explain how I've used Mentimeter to deliver interactive flipped workshops for stage 2 and stage 3 teaching. This slide gives an overview of how Menti fits in to the teaching. For the Menti presentation itself, I use various features of the software, and we've used the same template as we've used across the term and that's across different staff as well, and we've found that the students really like the consistent format.

So now I'll show you example Menti slides for each section of the workshop. so I'm answering questions posted previously during the week and those that are also posted on the day during the session. And I think the fact that it's anonymous really helps get lots of questions. I use slides from the PowerPoints from the recordings to help go over the difficult concepts. I do find it sometimes easy to get carried away with this section, so I try and set a time limit, usually about half past the hour, and then I can answer any other remaining questions offline.

For the next part of the workshop, I'll do an MCQ quiz, so maybe about four or five questions relating to core knowledge from the topic. This part of the workshop's really good fun, gets really good engagement from the students. But we did get some feedback early on from students with reading difficulties that were struggling to process the questions in the time limit. So the default in Menti is quite short. So then, in future, I lengthened this to 30 seconds and found that students were much more easily able to process the questions in that time. Yeah, and the live leaderboard that you get after each question, you know, makes it quite exciting, as I said, the students really, really enjoy this, this part of the workshop - it's quite exciting.

And then after that I'll set some questions that the students work together in groups at their tables and then they post answers using Menti on the flowing grid. And this is a nice format where you can sort of take stock of of all the answers. And I usually then finish the session by going through a model answer comparing this with the students' responses and I can sort of comment on the success and the pitfalls of their answers.

After the session I'll usually post a pdf on the vle of the slides so you can download that really easily from the presentation. And you can also download all the data - all the response data - as an Excel file, which means you can extract data and maybe present that more accessibly than than a PDF. So I use this to create a summary of the Q&A, so I extract the question information and then make a summary document with the answers that can be uploaded to the VLE. And I also record the session on replay, so that works well because most of the session involves action on the screen.