“The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice.” Brian Herbert
In the last Tip, I shared virtual learning activities for developing preprogram content, starting-before-you-start, and helping participants minimize distractions- all drawn from Cindy Huggett’s Virtual Training Tools and Templates: An Action Guide to Live Online Learning. Her book is excellent, with practical and immediately usable worksheets, checklists, templates, tools and tips. I strongly recommend that you read it, because these learning activities are only a small part of the book!
Here are more virtual learning recommendations and activity ideas from Cindy:
- Plan an opening activity. Here are her five favorites. (Note that, except for activity (3), all the other activities create information that can be referred to or built upon during the program.)
- Place the agenda or objectives in a poll and have participants identify which items are of most interest.
- Post a whiteboard for participants to type in their questions about the topic.
- Ask a series of experience questions with status indicators (raise hand, give a green or red check).
- Share a relevant case study onscreen and have participants post their reactions in chat; and
- Post a checklist of relevant common challenges and ask participants to choose which they face.
- Have energizer activities For example:
- Brain teaser or trivia questions, asked at various times, with points for correct answers.
- Creativity challenge that has participants draw something specific on a whiteboard.
- What’s outside your window? -asks participants to identify one thing in chat.
- Chair yoga pose-ask participants to put both feet on the floor, sit up straight and take a deep breath; or put their hands on their shoulders and draw their elbows backward, which opens the chest; and
- Photo puzzle with a photo of something that is not obvious, so they must guess.
- Have a closing activity. For example:
- Share insight or key takeaway.
- Accountability pairs- have pairs exchange contact information and arrange a follow-up conversation to discuss how they are applying what they learned.
- Note to self- have participants send a private chat to the facilitator, including their email address and a short note to themselves they’d like to receive a few weeks after the program; and
- Red light, yellow light, green light- divide a slide or whiteboard into three columns where red responses will indicate what will stop them from implementing what they learned, yellow indicates potential roadblocks, and green indicates action items or ideas they have for applying what they’ve learned.
- Keep in mind five slide design tips she has drawn from Wendy Gates Corbett:
- use big visuals.
- make sure visuals have “write space” for annotations.
- minimize visual distractions by removing as much extraneous slide content as possible.
- use color to indicate a change in content or activity; and
- place a simple onscreen statement that has one or two blanks that you can fill in with the text tool.
How are these for creative, easy to facilitate virtual learning activity ideas???
May your learning be sweet- and safe.
Deborah
