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Case study: Using Mentimeter to engage students in Learn Ultra before seminars

Department of Psychology
Thomas Davies

Thomas Davies describes how he uses Mentimeter as a Padlet replacement for asynchronous learning activities on the VLE. Students submit responses to key questions before taking part in seminar discussions to encourage active reading and boost confidence to engage in the session. Embedding Menti allows students to view peers' anonymous contributions, helping them gauge understanding and prepare more effectively. He then provides formative feedback on responses and using them to structure the seminar discussion.

Watch their presentation:

Using Mentimeter to engage students asynchronously in Learn Ultra (Panopto viewer) (5 mins 54 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hi everyone. I'm Tom. I'm a lecturer in the Psychology Department at the University of York. In this presentation, I'm going to share with you how to use Menti for asynchronous learning in on-campus modules. So a bit of context for why I wanted to add Menti activities onto the VLE. So some of you probably know Padlet is unfortunately no longer supported by the University of York. So I needed a replacement for one of my courses because previously I'd used Padlet on the VLE with good success. So I wanted to still have an activity on the VLE, which students contributed before class to encourage active learning of their reading and to help promote participation in class discussion activities by increasing students' confidence before arriving to class. Menti is a good replacement for Padlet, as Menti open-ended style questions replicates the look and feel of a Padlet. Even if you've never used Padlet and maybe you just want to learn about how to add an active learning element to your VLE site that students can contribute to before class. Menti is an excellent choice for this.

In my year three and four seminars, students discuss the material in small groups before I open the discussion up to the whole class. Many find this intimidating, but VLE activities that are aligned with the class discussion topics scaffold students to feel more prepared and confident for the class. For example, contributing anonymously before class gives students time to reflect and plan how to express the ideas in class. They also like seeing each other's responses in the VLE, and it helps them to gauge whether they are on the right track. Again, I've had positive feedback from students and students seem to enjoy this. In class, I display the VLE responses and I offer feedback and encouragement. And generally at the start of the course, I'm very supportive and open, even if the students don't quite get things right on track. I'm really trying to reinforce and really trying to be positive about things, and I'm also scaffolding my responses and my feedback to students throughout the semester as well.

Okay, so let me show you a little bit around what I've got here on my screen. So on the right you've got the Menti website. On the left is just an example of one of my weekly seminars for my third and fourth year advanced social psychology course, which happens to be about political psychology. But this video is relevant to all staff at the university. So I've just got, um, some learning outcomes for the students at the top-left there. Um, I've got a bit information about what you doing before the seminar, information about the reading. I got a few discussion questions that they can discuss in the class. I've got to give them a bit of a heads up. Got a nice little video there from, uh, Jonathan Haidt. And then down here at the bottom of this page, I've actually got the Menti activity embedded into the VLE. And this is what your sort of Menti activity can look like.

Before I present the Menti, I've got a little bit information to share with you, that I encourage you to share with your students as well. So, you know, if it's the first time doing this with students, you know, just let them know that there's a new activity to do, you know, before or after doing the reading that you want the students to contribute to this menti and give them a little bit of a heads up about this. The purposes of this for me was to get students to think about the weekly reading. So the weekly reading was about a topic called concept creep. It's about the semantic shift in some of psychology's core concepts. And the paper involves six case studies - about different psychological concepts. And I just wanted students to pick one case study and provide a positive and negative example of a changing and the semantic meaning of different psychological constructs. At the start, this is what students see when they first see this site in the VLE It's just got some more information there for the students.

So further down on the VLE. So this is the results of, uh, activity that I got students to do last week for this seminar last week. So these are actually the students responses that they've contributed. And this is just one of the - the first case study, which was about the concept of abuse. The second case study was about the concept of bullying. This third case study was about trauma, so on and so forth. And there's six case studies there. But the topics of those aren't too relevant. But what's more important is just the fact that each of these grey boxes are things that students have contributed to and things that students have written in ahead of the class and that have appeared on the VLE in real time live so that students can see other students contributing. And students can also see their own responses before going to the class, and so they can see how they're doing relative to other students.

So Menti embeds really nicely into the VLE, I think it looks really good. So you can if you've got this, this, Menti slide happens to be quite a popular one So there's quite a few responses here. And you can see that you can just scroll down and it works really. Well, um, in the Menti. You click along and scroll down as well. So what are some benefits then? So for me as a lecturer, it's nice to see how engaged students are. And so you can see exactly how many students are contributing to the Menti. And you can also see when they contribute as well. Um, so for my students, they typically just contribute the day before the class. But that's fine. It doesn't bother me. Um, I can also see, you know, depending on the sorts of questions that you ask students, I can also see how they're getting on with material, what they're understanding well, and so it's also an opportunity for me to provide some formative feedback for the students when I go over the results of their asynchronous Menti within the classroom. So I go over these results with the students and show them what they did right and what they, when they could possibly work on that sort of thing. Students seem to enjoy these activities. Um, they've commented in my module feedback about how they appreciate any sort of group activities so they can see their classmates' responses in the VLE.

In a second presentation, Thomas also provides a demonstration of how he created his Mentimeter presentation and how he embedded it in the VLE. He also describes how he aims to create a safe environment for anonymous open text entries in Mentimeter. The following page also has guidance on how to use Mentimeter asynchronously as shown in the video.

Watch their presentation:

Using Mentimeter to engage students asynchronously in Learn Ultra - Part 2 (Panopto viewer) (7 mins 9 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hey, everyone. My name is Tom. I'm a lecturer in the Psychology Department. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to create a Menti - on Mentimeter - and then how to embed them into the VLE. So when you're on the Menti website, uh, logging in with the university login details, of course, click on 'New Menti'. Click on 'start from scratch'. And here you're getting a variety of different options. And these are all of the different Menti styles that you can choose. So you can have a look at this in your own time. There's lots of different ones that you can use, but I'm just going to give you a basic demonstration of how to do this. So I usually actually start with text. And I just give the students some details about what the Menti is about. Okay, so I've just got some instructions - ten minute Menti activity before seminar six. Then I'm going to add in another slide. You're just going to click 'New Slide'. I'm going to use a word cloud. These are quite fun, quite aesthetically pleasing and look quite cool I think. So I'm going to say something like. 'What comes to mind when thinking is that Brexit?' Might actually do another word cloud there. I might ask the students something - 'how did you find the reading this week?' And so I'm going to do an open ended style - I quite like these, open ended styles, very similar to Padlet. So if you're trying to just find a quick work around for Padlet, um, now that we don't have access to Padlet anymore, um, this open-ended style is a pretty good option. So you can just pop the question up here.

Okay. So this is a basic Menti done there. You know, you can just do short Mentis. Sometimes I do Menti activities that are even smaller than this. And I'll just ask students one question. So you don't have to be elaborate and ask lots of questions. Obviously depends on the purpose of it and what you're trying to get students to do. But for this example, I've just got a few slides here and this is good enough for me. So now let's get onto some settings. You need to name the Menti. So I'm just going to name my 'example presentation'. For each of the slides you need to... Where it says show instructions bar on the bottom right underneath join instructions. You need to toggle that off that for each of the slides. And the reason why that is because we're going to get students to contribute through a link, which is down here in the bottom left, which I'm going to show you how to use. Not through a code. So usually you'd use a code when you're in front of students in the classroom doing it live. But for a survey style now you need to do it, um, with a link, and I'll show you that in a second. So first up I'm going to click settings. I'm going to change the settings to Survey Style so that participants can go through the menti at their own pace at home. I'm going to allow multiple submissions per device, because I don't mind if students want to contribute more than once, that's fine by me. So you think going to go over to 'share'. What we're going to do is copy this link here. So I'm just going to click 'copy'. Copy the participant link.

And then I'm going to go over to the VLE. And then I'm going to add that link into the VLE so that students can click on the link to the Menti within the VLE. And then that's going to take them to a new page where they can fill out the Menti. And then I'm going to embed the menti in below that, and I'll show you just that in a second. So we're just going to go to 'Edit'. Edit this text here. 'Log in to Menti by clicking on this link'. So I'm going to edit the link. Make sure it's the correct one. Save it. Click 'save' there. And then we're going to go back over to Menti. And I'm going to switch this embed slides uses Coach and Video Menti online with live results. I'm going to click 'Copy Code'. And I'm going to go down here back over to the VLE. Add in a new block and I'm going to click 'HTML', going to paste that text that we just got from Menti straight in there. And it's really as simple as that. And then now you've got your Menti embedded into the VLE. Just to give you a quick demonstration of how this looks. So you can just click through the Menti on the VLE. And this is where students will be able to see as well. Remember, students are not going to be contributing directly into this Menti have got to click on this link here. So let me show you that. So students going to click on this link. They're going to do this activity - What comes to my mind when thinking about Brexit? You might say something like 'politics', 'Europe'. Then we're just going to click on next question. 'How did you find the reading this week?' Alright. One positive and one negative and then submit. So that's the end of the Mentimeter. That's cool. So let's now go back to the VLE. What are you going to see is that those responses that I just filled in there are already going to be on the VLE, which is, I think, really cool. So let's go back to just having a look in the VLE. Clicking across. And so when students contribute to your Menti, it's going to come straight up in the VLE like this.

But you might be thinking, well, you've got the you got the Menti up on the VLE, but actually maybe you want to change the title. Maybe you want to change some stuff. And this is where Menti is really cool. So you can change that Menti even while it's still embedded into the VLE, and it will update for you. I might add in some text. So I've just added in some new text to the Menti and that should just update there. Like you see there on the left hand side, your screen is just instantly updated to the VLE. Now you do have to click on it. So if you make a change like I'll just bold all this and show you. So that's changed on Menti. But for it to change in the VLE, Just need to like left click on the and it will change. So don't worry if it doesn't appear instantly, you just got to click on it and it will change.

The other thing to note is, you know, when you've got um, these sorts of open ended responses, um, like this these opening styles - and anything to do with Menti really is that it's good to remember that students responses are all anonymous. And so we have to be mindful about the types of responses that students are going to contribute to. And I find it's a good idea to set the tone and set the atmosphere and set your expectations about, you know, what you're expecting from students in terms of being kind and considerate and compassionate in the way that they're writing and thinking about ideas and talking about people and that sort of thing. We've also got some advice and guidelines about navigating and using Menti, um, in its anonymous form. So if you're interested in any of that, um, just have a look and will include that in this video. But that is all from me. I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you very much.