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MAXIMIZE PARTICIPATION in Virtual Meetings

In light of the Coronavirus, I asked our LinkedIN group for their best suggestions to keep any virtual meeting and learning event fun. Whether you’re working from home, conducting online meetings, webinars, or facilitating remote learning, these tips will serve you well. In this four-part series, I’ve synthesized the suggestions and broken them into several categories:

  1. Ways to Connect
  2. Prep your Attendees
  3. Make Meetings Participatory
  4. Learning Apps

This post focuses on STEP 3.

Make Your Virtual Meeting Participatory

After you’ve selected your online meeting tool, these resources will help make the remote gathering fun:

Audience Response

Audience response tools require participants to download the app to their phone, then enter a code or access key to participate.

Mentimeter

Mentimeter (like CloudVote below) is a tool to “make your audience feel involved by enabling them to contribute to presentations with their smartphones and show the results live.” Mentimeter has variable pricing for schools and businesses, which vary based on the size of the group and the features you wish to use.

CloudVOTE

Have everyone use their cell phone to “vote” and see the group’s synthesized results on your PowerPoint slide.  A one-month subscription is $250. A one-year subscription for CloudVOTE is $720 at time of writing.

Poll Everywhere

Engage groups using pollling, surveys, word-clouds, Q&A and more. PollEverywhere has multiple subscription plans ranging from $120 – $1000 annually.

Online Scavenger Hunt with Scavify

Try a virtual scavenger hunt….give them a list of facts, applications, tasks, that they can complete or have to find within their work environment.  Assign point values to each item, “penalties” for incorrect items, and bonus points for completing it both correctly and quickly.  ~ Ronald Blumenthal

Scavify is a great scavenger hunt app and user support really great. Leaderboard in view at all times as are all the photo uploads and GPS check ins. ~ Tina Storey

Meeting Zest for Live and Virtual Meetings

Meeting Zest Online Conversation PromptsAsk each individual to answer one of these questions that focus on “me,” “we,” or “me & we.”

  1. A high/low of your day, so far
  2. Something you’d love to learn this week
  3. Things that cheer me up on a bad day
  4. I want to be remembered as _______
  5. Three things on my “to do” list
  6. The thing I most procrastinate
  7. An insight about our team
  8. If we added someone to our team, I wish they’d _____
  9. A weekly tradition we ought to start
  10. We should do better at appreciating _______
  11. Something you do for us that “works well”
  12. Something I wish this group knew about me
  13. What I really like about our team
  14. A (work) project that brings pleasure (past, current or future)

Roll the Dice with MeetingSpicer Icebreaker and Closer

The folks at MeetingSpicer.com shared this tool to get people talking and interacting.  To start, all you need is for one person to roll a die, or pick a number from one to six, then see which question will get you started. See the MeetingSpicer Notes here.

Use online card decks during a Virtual Meeting

Try Deckhive.com for card deck activities that require participants to choose cards, swap them in and out, discuss images, etc.

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