Case study: Weaving Mentimeter into lecture content

Department of Education
Jelena O’Reilly

Jelena O’Reilly describes how she uses Mentimeter to engage students in a large module on Individual Differences in Education, which covers topics like intelligence, personality, and self-esteem. She incorporates interactive questions throughout the lecture to gather her students’ views and prepare the group for teaching, as well as to review materials and make connections between different concepts and teaching sessions.

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Weaving Mentimeter into lecture content (Panopto viewer) (3 mins 25 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

I use it in my teaching regularly. For example, this semester I'm teaching a module called Individual Differences in Education and we cover different things from intelligence, personality, creativity, motivation. There are about ten of them. And I guess in many ways it's - it's a big room. It's like about 60 students. Um, I guess the module can feel impersonal. Plus, you know, these are all kind of separate topics. Sometimes it's hard for them to kind of, uh, see, um, how they're connected. So to kind of keep them engaged, every few slides I have a menti where I will then ask them for, for their input. Yeah. So you can - here - so in this one we were doing. So why do people choose different jobs. So I asked them uh, to uh, tell me why people choose different jobs before I told them. So that was one of the first questions that I asked them. And I get quite good stuff. You can see it's really a lot of different, um, different types of answers. Then to kind of make it more connected to other parts of the module, I will ask them. So these are, you can see - intelligence, personality, creativity and so on. So these are all the kind of individual differences we've covered. And I'm asking them which of these is the most important for job choice, to kind of make a connection between all the other components of the module and this one.

Then we did self esteem. So this one was an open one. How does self a self esteem impact academic achievement. They actually always have a lot to say which like if I ask them a question in person, they would never tell me any of this. So I get quite really versatile stuff. That then kind of opens up discussion. Then this one is a simple, uh, the current education system is conducive to developing or fostering self-esteem. Kind of yes or no. Just to gather their experience a bit. And I usually use this kind of stuff to make leads or connections to what they can expect from the seminar discussion. So in the seminar we discussed how the education system does or does not foster self-esteem. Then we've got a word cloud. The last thing we talked about was resilience. So I wanted them to tell me what characteristics does a resilient person have. And then the last one was uh, I was asking them whether they had mindfulness sessions in the, in their schools and whether they were useful as a way of improving resilience.

So I think they have different purposes. I think mostly for them to be engaged and to kind of feel like they're part of the lecture, as opposed to me just lecturing at them. Um, yeah. As I said, it can be. Yeah. To kind of, um, prompt discussion or for me to kind of say, well, more of this is going to be discussed in the seminar. So, yeah, just to keep them kind of engaged with me and to show them that I do value their opinion in all of this - it's not just me lecturing, but their opinion matters.