Mentimeter is a web-based polling tool, that allows you to gather reponses from students to engage them in their learning. It can be used synchronously, during lectures or other teaching activities. It can also be used asynchronously, between in-person sessions. You can read more about polling in our overview guidance page.

Using PowerPoint to present lecture slides, interspersed with polling questions, is quite common. While it will be possible to add Mentimeter question slides to PowerPoint using an add-in (see the FAQ below for more detail), we recommend a slightly different approach.

How to sign into your Mentimeter institutional account (staff) using Single Sign-on (SSO)

Visit this link: Log in to your account – Mentimeter
Click the Log in with SSO link.

Search for University of Bath and click Continue.

Sign into the Microsoft pop-up with your work email address (in the format username@bath.ac.uk) and password, and you will see the Mentimeter dashboard page, with your profile details visible on the top right.

A recommended approach to using Mentimeter Polling

Before your session

Create your PowerPoint presentation.
Upload this to Moodle before your session, for your students to access.
Create your Mentimeter question slides. If you intend to use polling frequently, it will be helpful to create folders in Mentimeter to organise your questions/presentations. You can add an instruction slide so students know what to do to access the polling questions.

If useful for you, add a placeholder slide to your PowerPoint presentation for each polling question you will use. Alternatively, add some text or a graphic to a slide as a reminder to pause and ask a question.

During your session

At the start of your teaching session:
- log in to Mentimeter, open your presentation (that contains the list of question slides you need) and click Present
- From the Start menu, open your PowerPoint presentation and run it,
- inform your students that during the course of the session you will ask them to visit www.menti.com on their internet-enabled device (PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone) in order to answer polling questions.
When you reach a point in your presentation where you want to pose a polling question, switch to the web browser. On the GTA room PCs, this is done using ALT+tab on the keyboard.
The first time students need to respond to a question, they should enter the relevant code displayed at the top of the question slide, via www.menti.com.
Use the toolbar at the bottom of the Mentimeter slide to manage your polling question.
When finished, return to the PowerPoint presentation using ALT+tab again.
You can repeat steps 6-9 until you have completed your presentation.

After your session

The results from your polls will be stored in Mentimeter to refer to later.

Using TurningPoint content for Mentimeter Polling

Preparing to use a new tool

Unfortunately, it is not possible to transfer question slides from one system to another. Instead, the transition process, from using TurningPoint to Mentimeter, will generally involve the following steps:

From your PowerPoint presentations, copy and paste question and answer text (from the TurningPoint question slides) into new Mentimeter question slides. This could be a useful point to reflect on the questions you have previously used and consider whether they need updating.
Following step 1, remove (or hide) slides from your PowerPoint presentations that include those TurningPoint questions.
When presenting from PowerPoint, add a placeholder slide or text as a reminder to pause and switch to Mentimeter to ask a question.

To recreate questions in new Mentimeter slides

Open the original PowerPoint file and be prepared to copy and paste the relevant question text and answers. If you prefer, you can save your PowerPoint file to Word to make copy and paste easier. You can do this from PowerPoint by selecting Export > Create Handouts > Outline only.
Log in to Mentimeter. Click the ‘New presentation’ button and give it a suitable name.
For Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ), select ‘Multiple Choice’ from the ‘Slide type’ menu. Copy the question text from your PowerPoint presentation and paste into the ‘Your question’ box.
Copy all answers text from your PowerPoint presentation and paste into the ‘Option 1’ box. Answers will be copied into the relevant option boxes for you.
If you have included images in your original PowerPoint, right click and choose ‘Save image as’ and store the file somewhere sensible. In Mentimeter, you can then upload the image to the relevant area.
In your Mentimeter slide you can amend various options in the ‘Extras’ section, such as showing the correct answer, or allowing multiple responses. You can also choose the ‘Customise’ tab for more options, as well as review the overall ‘Settings’.
You can add a ‘New slide’ for each question you want to recreate.

Note: it might be possible that some staff have created their polling questions directly in TurningPoint using question lists, either in the software app or in the web version. See the FAQs below for advice.

FAQs

What do I do with polls I created in the TurningPoint dashboard or on the TurningPoint web version?

It is not possible to import questions to Mentimeter. You now should follow the instructions above for creating Mentimeter questions, but if you need to access your content from TurningPoint the folllowing should help you do this.

Question sets created directly in the TurningPoint app can be exported in .rtf format from the TurningPoint dashboard.

Log into the TurningPoint app
Click the Content tab
Select the question set you want to export
From the Content drop-down menu, select Export, then select Rich Text File (.rtf).
Save the file to a suitable folder

If you used the TurningPoint web to create your questions, the process is not so obvious.

Log into TurningPoint web (you may notice it has been renamed ‘pointsolutions’)
Select a Course and then the Quiz you want to export
Select the Results tab
Under Sessions, select a Report
Click Export
An Excel speadsheet will download, and will include the question and answer texts for the questions in that quiz

How do I export TurningPoint student response data?

You can export response data from past polling sessions from the results manager.

Can I add Mentimeter question slides directly into my PowerPoint presentations?

The PowerPoint add-in is available to M365 accounts and is found under Insert > My Add-ins > Admin Managed list.

The PowerPoint add-on for Mentimeter allows you to add links to your Mentimeter questions directly to slides. You are advised not to do this for more than 4/5 questions. The questions remain in the ‘cloud’ and require the internet to work.

Can I import my TurningPoint questions directly into Mentimeter?

No, this is not possible. Although you are able to import PowerPoint slides into a Mentimeter presentation, this process will not import TurningPoint questions in any usable format. The questions will become images, and as such won’t work as polling questions. You can create new Mentimeter questions by copying and pasting the text from your PowerPoint into Mentimeter.

Should I build all my presentations directly in Mentimeter now?

We don’t recommend this, although it is possible to author your presentations directly in Mentimeter. The problems with doing this:

It is beneficial to share lecture slides with students before your lecture. If you share directly from Mentimeter, the students will see the questions you intend to ask. This may not fit with your intended lecture plan.
Although selected slides can be downloaded (i.e. without the questions), the resulting file is an inaccessible PDF document which would require fixing before sharing with students.
Presentations created in Mentimeter do not fit in with the institutional archiving and retention policy.

Can I share Mentimeter presentations with students before my lecture takes place?

Yes, this is possible, by sharing the URL link or QR code for your presentation, both of which are permanent links to the Mentimeter presentation (where your questions are placed).

Please note that when creating a presentation, a temporary numeric code is created for participants to join your presentation. This is visible on the question slides. The code is only temporary, and a new code is created after 48 hours. The presentation content and results are not affected by the code changing.

What do I do if I already have a Mentimeter account?

If you already have set up a free Mentimeter account using your Bath email address, in the format username@bath.ac.uk, then this can be brought into the insitutional account, including all your existing presentations/questions/results.

If you have set up a Mentimeter account using your ‘vanity’ Bath email address, in the format initial.surname@bath.ac.uk, then you should update this in your Mentimeter account settings to the format username@bath.ac.uk if you want your content to be brought into the institutional account.

Similarly, if you have set up a Mentimeter account using a personal email address, such as a gmail account, you can update this to the format username@bath.ac.uk so that it can then be brought into the institutional account.

Once your account has the correct email, you can log in using the Single Sign-on (SSO) link at Log in to your account – Mentimeter

How do I add equations and symbols to Mentimeter?

Equations and symbols can be added by writing LaTeX code between dollar signs (e.g. $A=\pi r^2$) – see Mentimeter math support.

Maths cannot be inserted into the answer options boxes. If your answer contains an equation, then “Add longer description” and include the answer options in a numbered list that correspond to the numbered voting options.

If you are unfamiliar with LaTeX you can write the equation using Word (and in the Equation tab, click LaTeX button and then Convert: Current Linear) or use an online LaTeX equation editor and copy the source LaTeX across.

NOTE: it is essential to not add a space after the first dollar sign (e.g. $\pi$ will render but $ \pi$ will not)

Learning and Teaching Hub @Bath

Polling with Mentimeter