- Online Meeting Toolseffective Curriculum Ideas Preschool
- Online Meeting Toolseffective Curriculum Ideas Activities
- Online Meeting Toolseffective Curriculum Ideas For Church
You can find dozens of online sticky note and brainstorming applications, but not all of them work well as part of an online meeting. We decided to test out all the online sticky-note, brainstorming, and decision-making tools we could find to figure out just which ones work best for quick collaborative sessions during a meeting. Have each member rank the meeting from 1-5, with 5 as the highest, and have each member explain their ranking Have the chief executive rank the meeting last. Closing Meetings Always end meetings on time and attempt to end on a positive note. At the end of a meeting, review actions and assignments, and set the time for the next.
Meetings may seem like the ultimate hold-out against the digitization of working life: after all, what’s more analog than talking directly with another person? Even though the core work of a meeting — listening to and connecting with other people — hasn’t changed, there are lots of ways technology can make that work easier and more effective. Given how much of our working lives we spend in meetings, building a digital meeting toolkit is one of the smartest investments you can make in tech-savvy productivity. Here are the tools you need:
Before your meeting
Find a group meeting time with Doodle, which lets you poll the various people who are part of your meeting, and find a time that works for everyone. You’ll get the best results if you hook it up to your own calendar (so you only offer people options that actually work for you) and if you set expectations by explaining you’re using Doodle to find the time that works for as many people as possible…even if you can’t find one that works for everyone.
Quickly schedule one-on-one meetings so the process of finding a time doesn’t consume more time than the meeting itself. Use Google appointment slots or Calendly to set up times when you’re available for calls or meetings, and when you want to take a meeting, share the link to your open slots. I don’t recommend sharing that link publicly unless you really want to take meetings with anyone who books a time in your calendar.
Need a place to meet? On-demand services like Liquidspace or Desks Near Me give you lots of options for finding a meeting space, even when you’re on the road. You can book weekly, daily or even by the hour. (Find a longer list of options here.)
Further Reading
Running Meetings (20-Minute Manager Series)
Managing PeopleBook
If you’re booking a call with someone in another time zone, make sure you’re actually booking the same time into your calendars. Send an actual calendar invitation, rather than just agreeing on a time via email, and as long you as your calendaring app has built-in time zone support (almost all of them do), you can avoid making a mistake. And use Every Time Zone to figure out what the time zone difference actually is, so you don’t invite someone to a 4 a.m. meeting.
During your meeting
Take notes in Evernote or another dedicated digital notebook application. Taking good, searchable notes makes meetings much more valuable, and the right note-taking tool will make it easy for you to file your meeting notes with the project or topics they relate to. Best of all, if you use the Evernote mobile app to snap pictures of your meeting whiteboard or flip charts, optical character recognition makes those handwritten notes searchable, too.
Share note-taking with Google Docs. Share note-taking duties with your colleagues by taking real-time collaborative notes in a Google Doc. Since Google Docs updates in more-or-less real time, you’ll be able to see and contribute to each other’s notes as long as you have an Internet connection. (Be sure to copy the meeting notes in Evernote afterwards, if that’s where you like to keep all your project notes.) That means you and your team can take notes collaboratively, so that if one person’s talking, the other person records what’s being said. This is a particularly nifty trick if you’re working with one or more colleagues on a client meeting or a meeting with another team, because you have a kind of psychic link — you can suggest ideas to one another alongside the notes you’re taking on the meeting. And if you don’t have an Internet connection, but you and your colleagues all work on Macs, you can use the fab SubEthaEdit to collaborate with even less lag than you get on Google Docs, simply by creating a computer-to-computer network.
Bring a reference screen for reference materials. The one down-side of digital note taking is that if you need to refer to a document during your meeting, you have to flip back and forth between your note-taking application and your reference document. That’s why I always carry my iPad; I use the application GoodReader to store any PDFs or documents I might need to look at during a meeting. And because GoodReader is hooked up to my DropBox account, I can always access a document I need to have open, even if I didn’t think to pre-load it in GoodReader.
Collaborate with mind mapping. I’m a huge fan of mind mapping: diagraming ideas and information visually, using something that looks like a tree or flowchart. While some people actually take their meeting notes in mind map form (been there, done that, reverted to text), I find mind maps most useful when I’m part of a group discussion where we need to capture and organize ideas together. My two favorite mind-mapping apps for meetings are MindMeister (very flexible and powerful) and Popplet (less expensive, a little easier to use, less flexible). If you’re using mind mapping in a face-to-face meeting you can simply hook a projector up to one computer, but the real-time collaboration support in these apps mean they’re great for collaborating during real-time virtual meetings, too.
While all the tools I mention above are useful in both face-to-face and virtual meetings, there are a few extra tools I’d recommend for people conducting virtual or phone meetings.
Share screens faster with Join.me. I’ve tried GoToMeeting, WebEx, Google Hangouts and Skype. They all work some (or even most) of the time. But the only bullet-proof screensharing tool I’ve used is Join.me. It works for me every time (knock on wood!), and because it’s so fast to set up a meeting and share a link, it works even if I’m already mid-call when I realize I need to share my screen.
Choose a backchannel. If you’re doing a client or prospect call with colleagues who are in another office or location, keep yourselves in sync by choosing an instant messaging backchannel before your meeting begins. There’s nothing worse than needing to send your co-presenter an urgent note…but discovering you have to wait for him to read his email so he can see it. Your backchannel can be Skype, Lync, MSN, Apple Messages or Gmail Chat — any messaging application works, as long as it has desktop support (so you’re not trying to type urgent messages into your phone) and you have connected to your colleague before the meeting begins. (Send a test message just to be sure.) Even if you’re using a virtual meeting application that supports private messaging, I recommend using a separate app as your backchannel so you don’t accidentally share your message with the client.
Online Meeting Toolseffective Curriculum Ideas Preschool
Record crucial phone meetings. If you’re participating in a phone meeting and aren’t in a position to take notes (or can’t type fast enough), consider recording your call for future reference. TapeACall, which is available for both iPhone and Android, makes it really easy: just install the app and then conference the TapeACall number into your call. (Note that in many jurisdictions it’s illegal to tape a call unless everyone consents.)
Online Meeting Toolseffective Curriculum Ideas Activities
Online Meeting Toolseffective Curriculum Ideas For Church
Set up these tools on your computer and mobile devices, and you’ll be better equipped to make the most of your meetings. Far from distracting you from your work and colleagues, this is one place technology can help you reconnect with them — by making the time you spend together as valuable as possible.