Trainers’ Toolkit – Word cloud of ideas

	Exercise nr 12: Word cloud of ideas
Duration	15 min
Type of activity	Social / Body / Emotional / Cognitive
The goal of the exercise	Strengthen the group: show the positive values, events happening around, building a foundation for further work
Group size	5-100 + participants
Hashtags	#knowledge #map #association #summarising
Apps	Mentimeter: The basic version of the application is free of charge.
Materials & tools	Access to Mentimeter app, participants mobile phones
Exercise agenda	Before the workshop: Log in to Mentimeter via https://www.mentimeter.com. Prepare a task for participants in advance. It can be a question to be answered or a sentence to be finished. In the application, options add a new presentation. On the right side from the available presentation types select: word cloud. When you start a discussion or enter a new topic or problem you might find it useful to gather answers from participants in the visual form. In the Mentimeter app, you can enter your question or a sentence you want to start with the meeting, e.g.: A good leader is… The topic [your topic] is for me about…  Write down the code that will appear at the top of the presentation slide. This is the access code for the assignment that you will give to your workshop participants. During the workshop: Ask participants to enter: www.menti.com on their devices with internet access. The app will ask for an access code. Give everyone the code from this slide. Each person will be able to enter 3 answers. You will see all the answers in your app. They will form a word cloud. Answers that are repeated will be highlighted graphically. Show the slide with the answers to the participants. What answers appear most often? What surprised you as a trainer? What surprised participants? The word cloud can be a great introduction to the rest of the training,  you can also use it when you want to summarise the discussed topic or problem. You can use this exercise both in online and offline training. It works well in small and large groups.
Possible modifications	Mentimeter offers different types of presentations to collect and summarize knowledge. Instead of the word cloud option, you can use: open-ended – then the participants’ answers will be visible in separate frames, each person will be able to give only one answer, instead of 3 as in the option described above.
Credits	Compiled by Fundacja Culture Shock for TRENDSS – Transnational Roadmap for Educators in Digital Soft Skills (https://trendss.eu/)Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)Co-funded by the Erasmus+Programme of the European Union