Even More Best Practices for Online Facilitators
— Transforming Organizations, Revitalizing Communities and Developing Human Potential
Our work this week has been focused on ongoing capture of best practices and learning for virtual collaboration - our new reality. Check out the video for some insights and some step-by-step instructions.
Here are some more best practices:
1. Provide a starting screen that identifies key tech information as well as a basic agenda overview.
2. Center or align the meeting participants with a moment of silence, a check in, a celebration, breathing exercise, targeted review of key tasks for the session [purpose & outcomes, etc.], a joke, or a prayer.
3. Assign a Co-Host - in case your connection times out, to help with muting/unmuting participants, etc.
4. Log into your session from a second device as a participant to see what the participants see as you are learning the presenter role [Thanks Melissa].
5. Leverage “Reactions” and Participant options [yes/no, go slower/faster, thumbs up/down, raise hands].
6. Use Polls. Create polls to open a meeting, gauge an audience, or even in real time [maybe be your co-host presenting a portion of content] to ‘vote’ on an option or decision. Polls can be anonymous while reactions [4.] are not.
7. Have two screens to allow you to ‘screen share’ presentations easily using the presenter view in Google Slides, for example. You can trial this with your laptop and the HDMI-input on your flatscreen TV. All you need is a long enough HDMI cable.
8. Use the chat feature for: Allowing students/participants to have “parallel” or “side-bar” conversations that would likely be discouraged in in-person settings.
9. Record your meetings - currently - during COVID-19 we recommend recording to your computer, not to the cloud. Then upload those videos ‘unlisted’ to your YouTube account and share the link to your youtube video with those who were unable to attend.
10. USE BREAKOUT ROOMS! A new option in Zoom is available to ‘push’ participants into breakout rooms. Alternatively, you can allow them to select to join a breakout room: When you are creating breakout rooms as host, you can access “OPTIONS ^” - on the bottom left of the breakout window that lets you select “Move all participants into breakout rooms automatically.” With that option selected, participants are moved by Zoom to the breakout rooms automatically, with the option unchecked, participants see a “The host has invited you to join a breakout room” prompt and have to click to join that breakout. The breakout “options” also let you select the countdown time to close the breakout rooms, automatic end for breakouts after a set number of minutes, and whether participants can return to the main session.
11. Use the reaction/emoji buttons in Zoom to have participants identify what breakout room they want to attend. Each breakout room would be associated with an emoji: Raise hand - Breakout 1, Thumbs up - Breakout 2, Handclap - Breakout 3, etc.
For more, see our previous session on breakout rooms and the 8 Simple To-Dos for Virtual Collaboration during the Coronavirus Scare webinar, and the rest of our BLOG4change. To learn more about managing breakout rooms in Zoom see: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/206476313.
Check out NEXUS4change’s webinar series of 30-min. high-impact change tool talks. Check our events page [www.NEXUS4change.com/events] for more.