Mentimeter - Poll Your Audience

Yesterday, in my Ed Tech Teacher webinar 30 Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers I demonstrated Socrative. Socrative is currently my favorite tool for using cell phones, tablets, and laptops to survey an audience. After the webinar I was contacted by a company called Mentimeter who offers a similar product.

Mentimeter allows you to pose a question to your audience and get instant feedback on that question through cell phones, tablets, and any other Internet-connected device. Mentimeter doesn't have has many features as Socrative or Poll Everywhere, but it is free and very easy to use. In the video below I provide a two minute demonstration of Mentimeter.



Applications for Education
If your school has been considering purchasing one of those expensive clicker response systems give Mentimeter and these three other alternatives a try before making a purchase.

Text the Mob - Poll Your Audience

Text the Mob is a polling that service that allows you to survey your audience through their cell phones. To use Text the Mob, create an account, write your questions and Text the Mob then provides your audience with a number to which they text their responses. Responses appear almost instantly on a large results screen suitable for projection. The one caveat about the free plan is that an advertisement is displayed on your results page.

Under the free plan, Text the Mob allows you to post up to three questions per poll and receive up to 50 responses. That is 18 more responses than Poll Everywhere provides with their free plan for K-12 teachers.


I discovered Text the Mob through David Kapuler's recent post about survey tools.

Applications for Education
Text the Mob could be a good no-cost or low-cost alternative to the proprietary clicker systems that some schools are purchasing. You can use surveys to gauge how your classes feel about their knowledge of a particular subject.

Here is a related item that may be of interest to you:
Nine Survey Tools for Teachers and Students