Learning and Development Professionals

  • 16 January 2021
  • 10 replies
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Who here works in a learning and development or training capacity at their company or uses Miro for those purposes?

I’d love to hear how you’re using it to foster engagement and facilitate learning in the workplace.

What boards are you using?

What templates are most useful for you?

what works? What doesn’t?

 


10 replies

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@Stewart Wolfe -

I am a trainer and consultant delivering project management and agile courses to learners in open public and corporate client settings.

I’ve been using Miro since March for all of our class exercises. Some are simple brainstorming/affinity grouping/dot voting style ones whereas others are more elaborate - for example, a drawing game to teach the basic concepts of working as an agile team.

I explored some of the templates when I first started to use Miro but found the effort to adapt them to my needs was greater than the value I was getting by using them so all of the boards I’ve created are built from scratch.

Key features for me are:

  • Bulk entry of sticky notes for true brainstorming
  • The timer for managing break time
  • Attention management to retrieve “straying” learners
  • Exporting boards to PDF so learners have something to refer to after the course

Kiron

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I’ve found the same issue. The templates are threat, but I always need something a little more specific or a little more targeted. 
 

what kind of templates did you build? Some of mine are around how to map a process flow or how to map out roles and responsibilities. These are simple conversations that I’ve found since Covid are generally much harder for people to have

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@Stewart Wolfe -

I actually avoided building templates as we only had a dozen or so boards to create to support our courses. Rather than create templates for each course, I’d create a board and then back it up to a local RTB file which I’d then restore whenever I needed to deliver that course. Of course there were certain common elements between boards such as the layout, icebreakers and so on, but these weren’t significant enough to merit creation of templates.

One of the challenges we had which led us to this approach was that because we were using different Miro teams to segregate our classes from one another, custom shared templates weren’t helpful as those exist within the context of a single team.

Kiron

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I’m a Learning and Development Specialist in my current organization, and I have used Miro for trainings, planning sessions, and project design. In training I have used it in tandem with Zoom breakout rooms rooms to replace flip charts or other activities for trainings’ breakout-group work, and it has served this purpose well. (We have used a competitor’s much simpler boards when complexity wasn’t needed, but I generally much prefer Miro). Recently I’ve used it to replace PowerPoint for presentations, creating frames instead of slides and hiding them until I’m ready to get to that portion of the presentation.

I have helped colleagues in other departments to use it for their strategic planning meetings using brainstorming, group inputs using stickies.

What boards are you using? What templates are most useful for you?

I generally create what I need from scratch, although I have started learning about agile and Kanban tables largely because of Miro boards.

what works?

Sharing and collaborating, locking and unlocking, hiding frames until the right time; all the basics work very very well.

What doesn’t?

The fact that I can’t release people from following me is a great pain in the neck in training. When presenting to a plenary I want people to follow me, and then send people into breakout rooms for individual work on different parts of the board. But not everyone will move their mouse or use the board so they continue to follow my movements. During those times I want to do facilitator stuff on the board -- review other parts, modify it, hide/unhide stuff, and generally prepare for the return of participants to the main room. But since I can’t release the followers, if I move my focus on the board any followers who haven’t moved their vew would continue to follow my view wherever I moved, distracting them from the portion of the board I have asked them to work on during their breakout session.

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I am part of an educational institute here in Germany.

Since corona our business had totally changed.

Now we doing all our seminars online.

We using for this WebEx, formerly GoToMeeting.

Our teachers using often the screenshare mode to share videos or PowerPoint-Slides or MS-Office Documents.

Im my own seminars I use via screensharing in 100% miro to share the content I present.

For concerns about the German law and GDPR and DPA  we cannot use the whole miro board to invite our participants onto the board. So we cannot collaborate with them that their can interact themself in the board.

We can only share the content as long there is no personal information from the participants available.

So to your questions:

What board I am using:

  • My own personal boards individual created for each and every seminar.

    I love to work with unsplash-pictures or iconfinder-symbols to make things more visible and understandable than without.

    I love to work with arrows and more.

What works:

  • Interactivitiy with all my participants (While I’m sharing my screen and get in dialogue with my participants everything is possible.
  • Every Integration of participants communication is possible (the sky is the limit)
  • So interaction with participants like you need it in classes is possible
  • Everything I dreamt of: 
    - Giving homework
    - Create a PDF as a summary of my lesson
    - Working with pictures (I never have to care for licencing because of integration with unsplash
    - Working with icons (same here)
    - Integration of MS-Office and other files like PDFs
    - Integration of Videos (only YouTube or vimeo)

What doesn’t

  • Onboarding for paricipants because of German law and GDPR and DPA restrictions
  • Integration of own hosted Videos (even if I use the same format like in YouTube or vimeo)
  • Mobile mode isn’t totally supported or is a bit complicated via screen sharing

 

Summary:

I am totally satisfied although I cannot use the onboarding and compilation possibilities of miro but for me the interactivity with my participants and all other points of what works is giving miro a huge step before every other tool I worked with before.

 

 

Michael

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Very interesting to hear about the GDPR restrictions. That sounds frustrating but you sound resilient and optimistic!

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It sounds like many of the L&D professionals here are building unique templates from scratch. I wonder if that signals that all of us might be able to do a better job of building templates that are more broadly usable.

 

I have created a board template that gives space for any course creator to kickoff a training. It is a simple frame with 5 spaces that give room for the facilitator and the learner to do explain the following:

  • What does the audience know?
  • What does the audience want to learn?
  • What is today’s objective and agenda?
  • What have we learned? 
  • What should we address later? (parking lot)

For me this has helped me efficiently train anything. In some cases I can build a workshop in about 30 minutes by adding a slide or two and an exercise.

 

Thoughts?

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@Stewart Wolfe -

I think the nature of creative work is that everyone has their own vision of what something should look like so getting a template to fit all contexts and perceptions is very tough. 

Rather than that, more usable templates are those which are components rather than whole board concepts, and those components should be as flexible and easy to edit as possible.

The only exception might be Miro versions of  “real world” templates which are standardized - official forms for example.

Kiron

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@Stewart Wolfe :

from your points I start mostly of my seminars with:
 

  • What should happen today that you can say this seminar was a success for you

Most times I search for a picture that fits to the audience and place a sticky onto it
Of course I’ve done this before the seminar starts in my preparation for the seminar

 

Then I collect the answers together as stickies onto this picture with the votings of my participants

After this I start with your

  • Agenda

to show what points exactly fits to the needs my audience told me before in “What should happen”

 

At the end of my seminar I’m going through the frames - like I made it in my PPT-Seminars and sum up:

  • What we have learned today

 

Michael

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@Stewart Wolfe -

I think the nature of creative work is that everyone has their own vision of what something should look like so getting a template to fit all contexts and perceptions is very tough. 

Rather than that, more usable templates are those which are components rather than whole board concepts, and those components should be as flexible and easy to edit as possible.

The only exception might be Miro versions of  “real world” templates which are standardized - official forms for example.

Kiron

What a brilliant insight! That’s really a good point and it’s altering my perspective on things as we speak!

We’re working with LEGOs here, not LEGO sets.

What components would be useful?

Off the top of my head I’m thinking of an Objectives template, a “here’s where I am and here’s where I want to be” template, a summary template, an action map template.…

one could pull these pieces together for any course!

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