Our recent community pop-up featured the topic of Together Your Online Training – and about one hundred of us had a blast discussing ways to stay organized when leading online trainings – which appear to be here to stay. Here’s a few highlights and goodies we discussed that resonated with the group!
- Get your tech game in order! Not surprisingly, the setup matters! (You can peek at my full setup in the below photo!) The group had lots of questions about my particular headset and ring light! But one of the largest questions was around internet – and what I do if things go down. Because I typically teach from Together HQ (my home office), I have a three-tier internet plan – regular wireless (with a home mesh system), a hard-wired Ethernet cord situation (which I set up myself, thank you very much), and as a last resort, a (high-powered?) Verizon MiFi – which I find to be better than an iPhone personal hot spot. Even with all of this in place, I still get a fast heart patter when I see an “Internet Unstable” warning flash before my eyes.
- Have your links – and everything else – ready! Ana spoke about the importance of a lesson plan with all links and chat messages at her fingertips; Cornelius discussed having breakout rooms ready. Basically, we approach this just like we prepare for our in-person classes – and then some! Ana takes the time to create lesson plans for each class we lead and this helps keep our whole team on the same page – and allows Ana to, for example, put the breakout room instructions in the chat window as I am saying them verbally!
- Prepare your Pacing! When running Zoom, Nearpod, Slack, and a class website all at once, I have found I need to go analog with my pacing sheet. Otherwise, it is just too many digital reference points for my brain to manage. After much experimentation, I found that this piece of paper works well to keep my pacing, notations on improvements, ideas to circle back to, and people I’ve called on across four quadrants. Before designing this template, I used a blank sheet of paper and it just got too hard to decipher! And yes, of course, I return to these each week as part of my Meeting with Myself – to transfer learnings. Want your own copy? Grab it here!
