Miro Tutorial: 6 Essential Features For Remote Workshops

Key Takeaways

hi in this video i'm going to take you over the basics that you really need to know if you're going to facilitate remote workshops in mira so if you want to facilitate remote workshops in mural there are some very important facilitator features that you should be aware of in addition to the mirror basics this video assumes that you already know how to use the basic features in mural and if you don't we have a video about the absolute basics of miro linked in the description so make sure to check that out first if you're not familiar with neuro at all before you continue watching this video all right let's get into the six things that you need to know as a facilitator running workshops in mira the first feature that you need to know is how to bring people to you what this means is that when you have multiple people on the board and you're facilitating an exercise you want to make sure that everyone is looking at the same thing that you're looking at otherwise you're going to be explaining things that your participants cannot see and this will just lead to confusion so you want to make sure that everyone is looking at the same thing no matter where they are on the board for example here i have ellie on the board here off to the side and i want to make sure that ellie can see what i'm seeing on this area of the board and so whenever i'm facilitating an exercise i just make sure to bring everyone to me because usually that's what i want i want everyone to be looking at the same thing i can also bring specific people to me in this case i'm just going to choose to bring everyone to me and i constantly do that with every exercise so that i make sure that no one is left behind or is confused when i'm talking about something that they don't see so again the way you do that is by clicking on your own icon in miro and then choose to bring everyone to you and it's important to note that to use this feature you need to be on a paid plan and you need to be either the owner of the board or the board shared with you from a colleague if you happen to be on a free plan you can still ask everyone to follow you but you'll just need to make sure that all the cursors are in the air that you're looking at before you move on so that you don't confuse anyone by talking about something that people cannot see the second thing that you'll use all the time is the timer feature to access the timer feature you go to the bottom left and you expand the tool set and you click on the timer icon so in here you can just input any time that you want so i can change this to six minutes five minutes or type in any number of minutes that i want and i can also use the plus and minus and i start the timer using this button i can also pick the music to be played while the timer is running this is usually very useful because you would normally set a timer in a workshop when people are ideating so you say like okay everyone let's all write ideas for 10 minutes and you play some nice background music to go with it in our experience from the music selection that's already built into miro uh the music calm flow and cosmic vibe those two tracks tend to be the least intrusive and can work well in a background setting while everyone is ideating without distracting them too much so whenever you're facilitating a workshop make sure to use the timer feature otherwise you'll risk losing track of time and disrupting the flow of your workshop the third thing you should know how to use is a feature in mirror called frames and frame a frame is just like a slide in a slide deck it's a rectangle that can be in any ratio so the way you access it is from this icon right here and you can either go with a fixed ratio or just draw a custom ratio that you can resize in any way and all the items that you put within a frame like this will be naturally grouped together this makes it much easier to organize the board and move things around so if i have multiple sticky notes here and i just move this frame around they naturally all move together and i don't need to keep selecting them individually the next feature you should know how to use is sorting this is a super handy feature to quickly organize sticky notes or any type of object and the way you use it is by selecting a group of objects and then you'll get this little icon to the top right of your selection and you simply start dragging that to the right and left to arrange and rearrange your objects in a grid the fifth feature you should know how to use is hiding and locking so these are really two features that we grouped into one and the first one applies only to frames which is why you should know how to use frames and you use this feature when you don't want to distract your participants with something that you're not ready for yet and so let's say that this is the next step of my workshop and i don't want people to read what's on here then i simply select the frame by clicking around the edge and i click the eye icon and that will just hide the frame for now and people won't see the contents of that frame and then when we're ready for this step of the workshop i can just unhide it and you can only do the hide or unhide to a frame you cannot use it on anything else i cannot for example select text and then hide it so that's why it's important to organize your content into frames and the next feature is locking and this really prevents accidental edits on the board from your participants so for any part that you don't want people to edit maybe the instructions or certain parts of the board that shouldn't be moved around for example like this frame i wouldn't want anyone to accidentally move this while i'm talking and so what i would do is select the frame and then click the lock icon and then if anyone tries to grab it and move it nothing will happen right i can even lock text so that it doesn't move around accidentally by anyone so i can click the text and then click the lock icon and then i cannot click and drag on this anymore and to unlock it i can simply click on it again and keep pressing and that will unlock it and the last thing you should know is how to set a start view so when you share a link to a mirror board with other people they will land on a default view now that could be the board the entire board zoomed out or that could be some random corner off to the side which is not what you want them to see you want people to land on the first step of your workshop so that they are reading the right thing when they first come to the mural board and to do that you just zoom into the area that you want people to see and you can right click anywhere on the board that's not an object and then click set the current view as start that way people will see what you're seeing when they first land on this mirror board alternatively you can click the settings icon up here and set the start view and that will give you a window that you can specify as the start view so if you select this then the board will be zoomed out by default for people and that's what they'll see when they first land on it or you can zoom into a particular area of the board if you want people to only see that when they land on the board that way you make sure that people are starting at the right place on your mirror board so those were the six essential steps that any facilitator really needs to know if you have more tips please leave them in the comments for others to see and let us know what your favorite facilitator tip is when using miro also if you have any questions leave them in the comments thanks for watching and see you next time