Guest post – DigiLearn: Student Interactive Response Systems, Meetoo: An innovative approach to obtaining feedback

Author: Kerry Pollard – Senior Lecturer (School of Community Health and Midwifery)

One PowerPoint add on I use frequently within the classroom is Meetoo. Meetoo is a real-time messaging and polling app that can be used by students in and out of the classroom. Students download the app on their devices and enter a code generated when you create your poll. The great thing is, your students don’t need to be physically present in the classroom to take part. The Meetoo questions you set will be sent through to their devices to answer.

The feature is great if you want to run generic polls. However, in my experience I have used Meetoo in two main ways. Firstly, I have used it within teaching sessions as a way of engaging students in the classroom to firstly test their knowledge in real time around the subject we are discussing. I often instruct the students in my sessions to work together in groups to answer questions. This has numerous benefits. It forces them to come together and form a learning community whereby students can learn from each other.  It also allows students to understand topic areas that they need to improve in as they get feedback immediately if they have answered the poll questions correctly or not.

The second function that I use Meetoo for in the classroom is to generate MEQ feedback.  The set University MEQ questions can be input into Meetoo and can be displayed in class.  The benefit of this is that you know how many people are active in your poll and you can see how many of them are responding.  This is a much more engaging way of obtaining MEQ feedback and has seen my MEQ feedback completion rise to 100%

What is even better is that you can export results and save them to an Excel spreadsheet.  This can then be embedded in to your end of module and course leader reports.

Polls can be anonymous and left open for students to comment and have some form of qualitative feedback and opinion.

Top tips

• Do a practice run first
• Give your students advanced notice to download the Meetoo app
• Don’t over use Meetoo
• Try to get students to work together to answer questions in class and form a learning community.
• Use it for all MEQs live in class so you can see the percentage of people who have answered at the time.