Voting to Interact with your Audience For Free

I spotted a very useful tool on a colleague’s website last week which allows you to use simple voting with your learners in class, for free. This web based system allows you to very quickly and easily create a question for them to anonymously respond to by visiting a url on their phone (or other mobile device) and selecting an answer. This can be very useful for getting instant feedback or for checking understanding.

So what is it? It’s called Mentimeter and works as follows:

1. You create a multiple choice question
How? Just go to the Mentimeter.com start page, type your question and with the click of a button your question is created. Add the possible answers; pick a theme and voilá, youre ready to go.

2. Tell your group/class/audience to vote using their smartphone
How? Youre given a voting ID when you set up your question. When the user goes to that address using their phone or PC, the question will be displayed together with the choices at hand, letting them vote without effort.

3. Show the result on screen
How? The presentation is automatically updated when new votes are received. If you want to hide the results when the audience is voting that option is included. You can also turn the question off if you want to control the time when the vote is open.

So, that simple, is there a catch? And why is it free? Will it stay free in the future?

The developers note that they think this kind of service should be as simple as possible, and that it also should be free. There are working on a premium version, but assure us that all the features that are free right now will continue being free.

To show how it works, why not have a go at the question below by entering the following url into the web browser on your mobile phone: http://vot.rs/11490. You can also answer it on the web here (which is the same web address). I've included the live snapshot below to show how the results can also be embedded in other sites. Once you've answered the question, you can view the results here or in the live image below. Please note, the embedded image might take a few seconds to referesh.

I hope you find it useful.

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