Forced Screen sharing/Bring everyone to me


Taking Attention Management up a few notches, there are times when I need to take back control of a session and ensure that the board participants are focused on what I am trying to show them.

I would like to be able to force a screen share/bring everyone to me so that their screens are seeing exactly what I am seeing and they can no longer control/move the Miro board.

I know the existing screen sharing/bring everyone to me also has its own challenges around the embedded content not displaying, so a 3rd party solution (Zoom, Google Meet, etc.) may still work better for the foreseeable future. If so, then perhaps the feature request becomes “Temporarily disable all editing of board” - I will post this next.

Yes, this whole topic of “attention management” is important to facilitators and trainers. “Bring to Me” is an amazing feature that I use almost every session, and I have participants who have wandered off ask me to “bring me to you again please”. It would be nice to also be able to

  • “Keep everyone with me” and
  • “release everyone” (also a separate IDEA post)

‘Keep everyone with me’ would be a fantastic function.


I want to echo @Robert Johnson's idea and bump it up to get attention. 

Miro is fantastic for workshop facilitation and collaboration on ideas. What I really need as a facilitator is to be able to present from my board and lock everyone's focus. Screen sharing almost achieves this. But we rely on participants to join the screen sharing.  
Like Robert, I think we need to be able to make everyone join screen sharing and watch what I am presenting. As a board owner and facilitator, I would call that presentation mode. 

My workshops start with a presentation to set the scene. I use images in frames as slides and present from that first. Then we breakout into interactive use of the board as I unlock objects. 
I want to start presenting / screen sharing and have everyone join me as we kick off the workshop. I want them to see my presentation of my frames, automatically joining the screen sharing session. 
This would make the board even more powerful for presenting remotely. Otherwise I have to use Teams or Zoom to share my screen and control what they see to start with. 

I'm keen to hear if anyone else supports this idea. 


Whoa! I can’t believe this idea is 2 years old and with only 22 votes. I’m relatively new to Miro, but I’ve found the best learner experience is when I’m not having to switch between some PPT content and Miro - and instead keep everything on Miro. But to do this, there are times when I want folks to follow me and not be able to stop, until I ‘release’ them. Right now, I’ll say something like, please have a relax and stop using your mouse and keyboards and just follow me… but it’d be amazing if this could be enforced.


@Johnathan Benson some time after this request from @Robert Johnson was made, Miro added “meeting mode” which accomplished this pretty well. Then a few weeks ago they rebuilt meeting mode to be specific “activities” version of Present mode and it is broken again. I imagine we are all hoping it is just teething problems and they will improve the new functions at least until they are as good as they were before.

The new Present Activities mode is pretty bad so far! It requires that participants click a button on a pop-up dialog to join the presentation. Before, they just automatically joined meeting mode when you started it. Some of them never seem to get the dialog pop up, so they are just lost until you teach them how to find the “join” button. Starting present activities mode also fullscreens your window for absolutely no useful reason that I can think of, and when you have chosen to hide the creation tools for participants, it now hides them for you as well. Why would that be useful?  The whole point of hiding the creation tools is to declutter and simplify the participant experience for new joiners during a participatory event, and now it doesn’t even do that until they have gone through the extra barrier of getting them joined up to the presentation, but it hides them for you for some reason.

 

We have been begging Miro for years to make the participant experience for new joiners as simple and uncluttered as possible. So far the newest version of present mode causes way more problems than it solves. Yesterday I had the extremely unpleasant surprise that when I started a voting function, many of my participants were not even invited to join the vote…. no time to diagnose or understand the problem, we just had to cancel the voting exercise and move on. Urgh.

 


Hey @Alan Heckman thanks so much for a detailed reply. I haven’t even come across ‘meeting mode’ of the mentioned ‘Present’ mode. I’ve just found this page to explain, so thanks.

I’m also struggled with the onboarding of learners who are new to Miro. In the workshop I run, we have historically used Jamboard - say no more. But we need ‘more’, so are taking the jump to Miro for folks outside of our Design community. Even though I saw a ‘starter’ course on Miro, it seems everyone would have to have a Miro license for that, whereas 99% of people in my workshop will be joining as a ‘Visitor’.

I’m resigned now to recording the learners a short Loom to watch before coming to the workshop, to demo the key things in Miro… and I’ve designed 3 opening activities to test their Miro skills which also ‘break the ice’. Hmmmmpf. Will see how this goes!


It would be good to have the “Bring everyone to me” option whilst in presentation mode, otherwise people are going to have to click on the “Return to Scott” button, and I fear this is just going to make everyone lose their way