It’d be hard to find anyone in the past three months who hasn’t been a part of a video conference meeting, webinar, training session, symposium, graduation, book reading or even a cocktail party. With the increase in the use of video conferencing solutions like Zoom and WebEx, it’s great to add interactive and engaging tools that help elevate the user experience for both small and larger events.
I was a part of a large symposium last week where a word cloud was used. Even though word clouds aren’t new, it really stood out and was extremely effective. In this case, since there were thousands in attendance, the responses came in fast and the cloud grew quickly with the many different responses.
The tool used was Mentimeter and there are many positives about the product.
Pros:
- The good news is there’s a free version available for educators and students that contains many attractive features, especially if you only want to use it occasionally.
- Unlimited audience size
- Unlimited presentations
- Unlimited Quick Slides
- Core question types
- Q&A
- Image and PDF export
- 2 questions per presentation
- 5 Quizzes per presentation
- Help Center
- There are multiple types of questions/layouts available besides word clouds, such as, multiple choice, open ended, scales, ranking, image choice and Q&A. This is great since most video conferencing solutions don’t have the variety available as part of the their built-in feature set.
- Another plus is the ease of use. I set up an account and had a presentation created and launched in under 5 minutes without having to read documentation.
Cons:
- One downside I see is with the level of flexibility and customization that comes with the free version. The paid versions, for example, gives you the ability customize themes, logos, prevention of audience downloading the results, owning your data, importing of PowerPoint or Google presentations, etc.
- Purchasing the Basic or Pro versions require a yearly subscription and can’t be purchased on a monthly basis.
- There’s a limit to the number of questions and quizzes you can have in one presentation, therefore, if you need more than you’ll need to create additional presentations that’ll need to be launched separately.
Overall, it’s a simple and inexpensive way to add to your next video conference.
