"You're On Mute"! surely one of the most used phrases throughout the world in 2020! Back in March 2020 in lock down 1.0, I wrote a guide and video tutorial giving people who had never used Zoom before tips on how to download etc. Little did I imagine almost a year later that Zoom would be such an integral part of our lives for work, home life and school learning. Fortunately since then Zoom has developed lots of free support guides, live training webinars and tutorials (if you haven't accessed their support page already here is the link).Virtual learning, teaching, coaching, delivering online courses and events is here to stay!

In the weeks leading up to Christmas I joined a business awards ceremony, a Christmas carol service and even had a bake-off with friends. The one thing that all these events had in common was a creative interactive element. As humans our attention span has never been shorter so when delivering an event online (course/strategy session workshop/cooking lesson) engagement is key. And with lock down restrictions and the rarity of exterior entertainment (theatre/concert-cinema-outing a distance memory) as a race never have, we needed a fun and interactive experience more.

Engagement

Converting a face-to-face workshop to a virtual format isn't always easy and as a business owner one of the most challenging elements is to make virtual events interactive as possible to keep participants engaged, interested and so they get as much as possible out of it. In a standard virtual call (Zoom/Microsoft teams/Webex) whatever your preferred platform, there are various things you can do:

• ask ice breaker questions and get people to put answers in chat function

• ask participants to annotate slides you are presenting

• put participants into breakout rooms with a goal/issue to work on

• do a live interactive quiz, poll, word cloud or Q&A session

Nothing can 100% replace face to face interaction but doing quizzes and polls is definitely one of the best ways to boost engagement, get real-time input and to keep your participants alert. Integrating these elements can also be a way of warming up a 'cold' or apathetic audience. One of the most engaging workshops I've ever attended was actually a Speed Awareness course delivered by an external provider through the PSNI. None of us wanted to be in that room and blamed them (rather than acknowledging our own culpability) but the way they delivered the course and by doing interactive quizzes they won us all around!

Helping clients facilitate virtual events/workshops/conferences in the past 9 months I've discovered there are a plethora of tools out there that allows the audience to:

- interact with the host and others in the group

-use their smartphones to connect to the presentation where they can answer questions instantaneously

-visualize their responses in real-time

And as a host you can

-share and export your results

-compare data over time to measure progress

Here are just 8 of the tools I've come across:

1. Microsoft Forms- Easily Create surveys, quizzes and polls

They have a quiz template and if you have an office 365 account you can easily create a quiz/ grade answers/ see questions participants got wrong/right and then even share feedback with them.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-quiz-with-microsoft-forms-a082a018-24a1-48c1-b176-4b3616cdc83d

2. Sli.do -Audience Interaction made easy

Slido is an easy- to- use Q&A and polling app that will turn your silent listeners into engaged participants.

https://www.sli.do/

3. Mentimeter- Interactive presentation software

With mentimeter, you can build interactive presentations and add questions, polls, quizzes, slides, images, gifs and more to your presentation to create fun and engaging presentations.

https://www.mentimeter.com/

4. Kahoot-Making learning awesome

Creating a quiz in kahoot you can share questions on Zoom but let participants answer on phones. Kahoot has different platforms tailored for school/home and workplace. They also have an Academy which serves as a global knowledge platform, community and marketplace for educators.

https://kahoot.com/

5. Poll Everywhere (abbreviated to Poll EV)-Host interactive online meetings

Tool with which you can set up a poll in advance and insert it into a slide when you are creating them. You can create multiple choice polls,open-ended questions, Q&A, rank order and clickable images. With the polls you can accept both text message responses and web responses.

https://pollev.com/

6. Mural-Put Imagination to Work

Mural is a great tool to plan for visual collaboration.

https://www.mural.co/

Functionality

With all of the above-mentioned tools, the price obviously increases with the functionality you need (audience numbers, no. of question /quizzes per presentation) so it's good to try out a trial period or a free version to see if it is a good fit and has functionality you need.

If there are tools you have tried and tested and which have had good engagement, please let me know in comments below.

Preparation

As with anything you deliver (face to face or virtual) preparation is key so the more you test, the better prepared you will be leaving you to deliver confidently and concentrate on the audience on the day. If you are nervous about using a tool or want a second set of eyes/ears to test out its functionality, please reach out to a virtual assistant like me. I used to take minutes at physical face to face minutes too and understand that sometimes you just need someone else there to take notes so you can concentrate on the content or how people are reacting to what you are delivering so if you need help in either regard please reach out to me alison@virtuali.uk My website services are listed here.