Speaker 1: The problem with online meetings is that they can be a lot more boring than in-person meetings. It's easy for the attendees to get distracted and as a presenter sometimes it's not your fault. The topic is boring and dry and you have to work extra hard to keep energy levels from falling. But there are small things you can do to get people to be more attentive. One really cool tool that you can use is a live word cloud during the meeting to get immediate feedback in real time. Another option is to add a live poll to your presentation. Good news is that there is a free tool that's super easy to use. So I've been in the audience where other people use this tool and I loved it. I think it's a great tool for businesses and it's also a great tool for teachers. Without much effort from your side you get to give memorable presentations. The tool I'm talking about is called Mentimeter. Mentimeter is a popular platform for audience engagement which lets you create fully interactive presentations. Now what does that mean? Well it means you can do something like this. You can create a live quiz with a timer and a countdown to get your audience to act. You can show them the leaderboard which is based on who got it right and who was faster and then you can move on to the next question. Setting up something like this is shockingly easy. You just need to set up an account with Mentimeter which you can do for free and then you create standard slides if you want as well as these interactive slides. Best thing is that your audience doesn't need to have a clue about Mentimeter or what tool you're using. All they need to have is their smartphone or laptop or some type of device that they can use to react in real time. This is web-based and it's available in any browser. So this is basically a tool that you can use when you're holding in-person live presentations or an online presentation. In an online presentation you're going to be sharing your screen and then people will see a QR code that they can scan or they get a link that they can go to and interact with your presentations. In a live meeting people can pull out their smartphone, scan a QR code and interact with you right then and there. So the basic version is free but there are also paid plans with additional features. In most cases the free version is a great way to get you started and it should cover most of your presentation needs. There's no limit on the number of presentations that you can create or on the size of the audience that you can engage with but there are some limitations on the number of questions and quiz types that you can create. In this video what I want to do is share with you some tips and tricks on how you can get the most out of the free version. So I've already created an account I'm just going to log in. If you've created a presentation before you're going to see it here. To create a new one click on new presentation. Give your presentation a name and create presentation. Now let's add a new slide. So here we can choose from different slide types. We have question types and notice as I'm hovering over them we can see a preview on the slide. There's quiz competition and content slides. Now there are no limits on the number of content slides you can include in the free version. When it comes to question size though you are limited to two per presentation in the free version and with quizzes you're limited to five questions per quiz. Now just to get a hang of how things work let's start with the heading slide. On the left you're going to see all your slides just like the navigation pane in PowerPoint. In the center you have a preview of your currently selected slide and you don't do any editing in this view here. All the editing is done on the right hand side and the type of options you see here depends on the slide type that you selected. So if you change your mind and you want to use something else you can adjust your selection here and the type of information on their content changes. I'm just going to go and put this back to heading. In this case it would be nice to add a heading so let's add it here. You can go ahead and add an image. You can upload it from your own computer or you can use the image library or use the gif library here. I'm just going to go to image library. Let's look for something. Let's go with this one. Click on save and it's automatically going to add it to the slide. If we're not happy with this layout we can go ahead and customize it. So I want the image to be in the middle. I'm going to go with this view but I don't want my text to cover the image. So down here under advanced layouts click on expand and adjust the alignment of the text. So I want it on the bottom. I'm going to go with this one. If you want to increase the font size you can do that here. To decrease the font size use the minus. Now everything is automatically saved so you don't have to worry about saving. Now notice this little heart icon here. That's something you can control on the content side. So you have the ability to allow your audience to give you some feedback in terms of reactions. If you don't want any feedback take it away. If you want specific feedback activate the ones that you need. Another cool thing is under themes here you can adjust your theme. Default is menti light. If you're a fan of dark mode go with menti dark. If you fancy bold and gold go with that one. Now notice that some of these themes are only available in the pro version. Now the pro version also allows you to create your own custom theme to adjust the fonts and replace that mentimeter logo with your own logo. But even in the basic version you have plenty of choices so play around with it and be adventurous. Now let's do something fun. Let's add a word cloud. So whenever you're starting a meeting or training it's good to introduce a little icebreaker to warm up the audience and in this case to help them orient themselves in this whole menti environment. So let's assess our audience's mood and visualize the results in a word cloud. We're going to go and click on new slide and select word cloud. Let's ask our question and adjust the entries per participant. So default is three but you can increase or decrease that if you want. Add an image if you'd like or add a gif. Just going to go here look for happy. Let's go with this one and click on save and this is automatically going to give us a word cloud. How does that look? Well you have the ability to preview this. So click on this down arrow and select preview presentation. So this is going to be your presenter screen and this is going to be what your audience sees. You can actually test this out. This is not just a live preview. You can interact with this and see how it's going to work. So when your audience comes here and they see this how are you feeling today they can start answering and then once they submit this is how it's going to look. Okay so this preview is great so that you can test things out and be prepared when it comes to the real presentation. Now at this point you might be asking but how does my audience even get here? You have multiple sharing options. You can instruct your audience to go to menti.com and then type in this code. It's a temporary code and it's valid for two days and it connects them to your presentation. But this is not so easy to do right because this is a long code with a lot of numbers so you want to make it easier for your audience to get here. One thing you can do is to add a slide with the barcode at the start of your presentation. So if you go to the new slide and scroll down you're going to see instructions. Click on this and it's automatically going to insert the barcode or the website address and the code that they can use to get to your presentation. So I'm going to bring this up here. People can scan this and they're going to end up on your presentation where they can interact. If you have an online meeting you can paste the link directly in chat. If I click on share here you can copy this link and drop it in the chat box. Now when it comes to your presentation you're not going to be in this view. You're going to be in presentation mode. So you can click on present or use the shortcut key P. And once you're here the audience are going to take out their smartphones. They're going to scan this QR code and then they're going to be ready to interact with your presentation. And then you're going to go on this slide. They're going to see the image that we saw in the preview before and once they start filling it up the results are going to pop up on your screen. Now what happens if someone joins the whole party a bit late? Well there's a great shortcut key for that. So let's say someone already came in at this stage and they don't know where to go. You can use the shortcut key I which automatically brings up the QR code. They will scan this and they can end up on your slide. If you press I again you go back to where you were before. Now another pro tip is to use the shortcut key K. When you do that this brings up the list of available shortcuts. So a cool one is the countdown. So if I select one I get a one minute countdown and then if I press it again it just adds a minute to this. If I want to cancel the countdown altogether I'm going to go with zero. Escape leaves presentation mode and you go back to your slide view. Let's try a poll now. Let's insert another slide and go with multiple choice. My question is what would you like to learn and the options are obviously Excel first. Now let's add some more Power BI and Power Automate. You can add more options here if you want and you also have the ability to add images. So this time I'm going to upload from my drive. Let's go with the Excel icon for this one and add the other icons as well. You can also decide on how you want to display the poll results with the bars or column chart as the default. Okay so when you go in presentation mode and people start to vote this is how it's going to look like. You also have the ability to create ranking which looks something like this. Your audience members can rank the options in order of importance. There's also Likert scales where they can rate their level of agreement or disagreement with a series of statements. The results can be displayed with sliders or spider chart visuals. Another cool slide type is pin on image which you're going to find down here under advanced questions. You can use this for example with a map to ask the participants to indicate where in the world they're from. You can also make it part of the quiz by selecting show the correct area on the map and providing the correct answer. Now here's a pro tip. The question and quiz slides aren't the only ones that are interactive. The regular content slides have reactions too. Remember we saw that heart and the thumbs up and thumbs down on the bottom of the slides. You can use that to quickly assess the responses of your audience and this way you can give yourself an extra question slide. Just insert another heading slide, insert your question and give instructions in the subheading. Thumbs up for yes and thumbs down for no. Just make sure under reactions you activate the correct ones. All of these different options will definitely make for a much more engaging session. Now talking about engaging presentations, if you're someone who wants to get better at communication, better at presentation, slide design or storytelling, a great platform that I can recommend is Skillshare. So they've been kind enough to sponsor this video. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for anyone who loves learning and anyone who wants to explore their creativity. So for me the feedback from my students in my courses is super important. So I use surveys to better understand how to improve my online courses. A class I found particularly helpful for creating clear and really concise surveys is the class Survey for Success by Sarah Cho. She talks about the power of surveys to grow your business, how to formulate questions in a user-friendly way and how to draw conclusions from the data. It's classes like this that can help you improve your skills. You can get the knowledge that you need to grow a side hustle, if that's what you want to do right now, or to take your career in a different direction. There are new premium classes launched each week, so there's always something new to discover. And because Skillshare is sponsoring today's video, the first 1000 people to use the link in the description box below my video or code Leila Garani are going to get one month free trial. So make sure you check it out. Thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. And now let's get back to our video. Now let's look at quizzes. So setting one up on Mentimeter is very similar to a multiple choice question. Only here you have to specify which answer is correct. So select answer is the multiple choice option and type answer is for open questions. So I'm going to go with select answer for this one. I'll go ahead and add my question and some options. I then select the correct answer. So I'm just going to place a check mark here, and then I can decide on the amount of time I want to give the audience to respond to this. You can decide if the people who are faster get more points. And if you want, you can add some music to this as well. By default, a leaderboard is going to show up after the responses for this question are sent in. But if you want, you can remove the leaderboard. So this is how the leaderboard is going to look. You have the ability to add multiple questions, and then once you're finished, the final winner is going to be announced. So far, we've been asking our audience the questions. Now it's a good time to turn the tables. The interactivity goes both ways, and you can use the Q&A slide type to invite your audience to submit any questions that they have on the topics you covered. This is how it's going to look. The questions are visible to all participants, so everyone sees which question you're answering. They can also like or thumbs up the questions that they want to have answered. Once you're done with the question, you can mark it as answered. And the good news is that the Q&A option doesn't count towards your question limit. Once you've gone through your presentation and people have submitted the results, you have the ability to download the results. You can get a PDF for free, or you can upgrade to get the export in Excel. And then let's say you want to reuse the slide and rerun the presentation, you can reset the results of this slide only or of all the slides. Let me know if you're already using Mentimeter at work. If yes, what do you think? Do you find it useful? If not, do you think it's something that you can add to your presentations? Let me know in the comments below. I hope you found this video useful. Do give it a thumbs up, do subscribe if you aren't subscribed yet, and I'm going to see you in the next video.