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 There is an outdated and never updated plug in which crashes all the time and thus unusable.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.

I really enjoy utilizing the integration of real-time polls and feedback mid-presentation. We have used Mentimeter, primarily making use of the poll feature, to gauge both student and advisor feedback and understanding. We have been able to pull the reports the gather additional data to share with our team. Whether for students or for staff, Mentimeter has been incredibly useful and allows anonymization of data, allowing us to see where things are succeeding and perhaps where things can be given a bit more clarity.

I did find it hard to pull reports, however, this may be a matter of me not being entirely familiar with the software. I was able to eventually get the reports, but it seemed that I had to choose between combining data from different presentations or creating separate presentations entirely. I would have liked a feature that allows me to combine all data under one "umbrella" so I can see trends between individual presentations and the overall project.

I like that you can run the whole presentation from Menti, but I think often average users don't do that. When I have been using it for my presentations, it put all the slides there, getting a nice smooth experience. That's much better than switching between "main" presentation and Menti, and I hope more people will use it like that in the future. I also like that you can nicely export the final co-created slides, with audience inputs.

I really don't have complaints, but just a wish. I wish that I could use Menti active presentation as my Zoom virtual background, like you can currently do with their beta function PPT as background. If that could be Menti as well, that would be brilliant!