As an educator, you can use Mentimeter to enhance student engagement, check understanding in real time and foster active participation.
This guide will walk you through the most powerful Mentimeter features for teaching with examples on how you can use them in your own classroom.
Why use Mentimeter in the classroom?
Traditional teaching often centers around the teacher, leaving limited space for student voices. Mentimeter shifts this dynamic by encouraging participation from all learners, including those who are less likely to speak up in class. Because responses can be anonymous, students often feel more comfortable sharing honest answers and opinions.
In addition to boosting engagement, Mentimeter gives educators real-time insight into how students are thinking and what they understand (or don’t). This immediate feedback makes it easier to adapt on the fly—clarifying a confusing topic, revisiting a concept, or facilitating discussion based on student input.
Other benefits include:
Encouraging reflection and critical thinking through open-ended responses
Making content review more engaging via quizzes and gamified elements
Supporting data-informed instruction by collecting and storing student responses
Creating a sense of community through collaborative tools like word clouds and rankings
Keep exploring the benefits and uses of Mentimeter in the classroom with our Mentimeter for Educators: Beginner Course at the MentiAcademy.
Key features for teaching and learning
Mentimeter includes a variety of tools designed for different instructional purposes:
Multiple Choice: Quick checks for understanding or classroom polls.
Word Cloud: Effective for brainstorming or gauging prior knowledge.
Open Ended Questions: Useful for deeper thinking, reflection or discussion prompts.
Scales: Allow students to rate their confidence, opinions or understanding.
Ranking: For evaulating and prioritizing ideas.
Quiz Competition: Adds energy and motivation to content review through timed, scored questions.
Q&A: Enables students to ask anonymous questions, useful during complex topics or revision sessions.
Example lesson plan using Mentimeter
Lesson Topic: Introduction to Climate Change
Duration: 60 minutes
Audience: High school or introductory-level university students
Objective: Students will understand the causes, effects and potential solutions to climate change.
Before getting started, make sure your students know how to join the presentation. Check out this article to learn more about how to participate in a Mentimeter presentation.
1. Warm-up / Icebreaker (5 minutes)
Word Cloud: “What’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear ‘climate change’?”
Purpose: Activate prior knowledge and set the tone. The word cloud offers a visual of students’ preconceptions and emotions.
2. Setting objectives and agenda (3 minutes)
Text slide: Use a text slide to outline learning objectives and what students can expect from the lesson.
3. Checking prior knowledge (7 minutes)
Multiple Choice: “Which of the following contributes the most to global warming?”
Purpose: Informally assess understanding and identify misconceptions early.
Pro tip: If you don't want students to be influenced by others' responses, you can hide the results and then reveal them only once all responses have been submitted.
4. Main instruction (20 minutes)
Text and image slides for delivering core content (definitions, graphs, examples)
Open Ended slide to break up the lecture: “Why do you think climate change is a difficult issue to solve?”
Purpose: Maintain engagement during content delivery and encourage critical thinking.
5. Interactive check-in (5 minutes)
Scales slide: “How confident do you feel about explaining the greenhouse effect?”
Purpose: A quick, anonymous confidence check that lets you know if your students are following and whether you need to revisit some content.
6. Collaborative brainstorming (5 minutes)
Open Ended slide: "What can you do in your daily life to help fight climate change?"
Purpose: Gather ideas from your students, then have them vote on the best ones or use AI grouping to get categorize and summarize all answers.
Once you've gathered all your students answers, you can summarize them and get a high level overview using AI grouping:
You can also ask students to vote on their favorite answers. Check out this video for details on how to use the voting on Open Ended slides feature:
7. Knowledge review (10 minutes)
Quiz: Use 4–5 timed Select Answer slides based on the lesson material.
Purpose: Reinforce learning and measure understanding in a fun, competitive format.
8. Check out and feedback (5 minutes)
Open Ended slide: “What’s one thing you learned today?”
Scales slide: “How clear was today’s lesson for you?”
Purpose: Check for understanding and collect feedback to inform future lessons.
Other key features
Questions from the audience: You can allow your students to submit questions anonymously throughout the lesson with the Q&A feature.
Participant names: If you want to know who submitted each response throughout the Menti, you can use the Participant names feature.
Note: Participant names is only available for Pro and Enterprise subscriptions. If you have a free or Basic account, you can try some of the workarounds described in this article on how to identify participants.