I’ve used Miro for about a year, in a college setting. I’ve never solicited student input on the boards, because it didn’t seem obvious how to accomplish that gracefully. I’ve just yesterday come across community post about a way of using “Projects” as a stand in for separating different course rosters into what otherwise would seem to be “teams.” That’s got me really excited about the possibilities for this year.
My observation is that 1) Miro is just incredible. I haven’t run into a tech tool with this much promise for college teaching in many years. I use it in pretty much every class as my whiteboard, to facilitate lectures and discussion of readings. 2) Miro’s website seems geared toward a corporate crowd. That makes sense, because most of us education folks are on free accounts (bless your hearts for those free accounts!). So 3) it can be difficult to figure out ways to reconfigure Miro for use in education. For example, I don’t find many templates, using keywords like “education,” “college,” “students,” “teaching,” etc.
Mostly, it comes down a a set of permissions that would make sense for an academic context. If the following can already be accomplished, I’m going to be the happiest guy on the planet. But I’ve looked and read, and looked some more… and I can’t find exactly what I need. Eighteen-year-old students have different tendencies than older adults who interact with Miro as part of their full-time job. It would be fantastic to see a way to give students permission to add sticky notes as well as comments, for example. It would be even better to limit their edits to their own material. I’m envisioning an option to select “student,” instead of “editor” etc. And then a set of follow up options that allow these other tweaks. Sometimes I’d like to have them work in teams, so joint editing would be great. But many times, I’ll be hoping that they play nicely with others’ content, as they edit and respond to a board I’ve created for use during class. I’m largely going to be asking them to use sticky notes, vote, comment on my lecture notes and copies of slides during class, generate their own answers to questions I pose, etc. I hope that I can encourage them to let me know what in-class content they are struggling with or have reactions to. At other times, they’ll be able to create their own teams and work together on a board as part of a project.
Without having actually involved students in use of Miro for a class, here some options I’d like to be able to toggle on/off:
“Students can SEE other students’ work on this board”
“Students can EDIT other students’ work on this board”
“Students can EDIT faculty work on this board”
“Students can see the student names and email address”
Are these kinds of things already possible? If not, surely there are seasoned education users who have even better suggestions for tailoring Miro for use in an academic setting.
