OK Zoomer is an intermediate-level Zoom workshop that assumes you already know how to do basic things like get into gallery view, mute and unmute yourself, and get your camera working.
You made a great point at the beginning about not trying to translate regular class into Zoom, but to work with the possibilities of Zoom itself.
Survey Respondent
Before I get to content I want to point out that this is a fun workshop. People enjoy it and report that the time flies by. “Show, don’t tell” is not just a cliche to me, it permates everything I do in education. There is no excuse for a boring, passive workshop on how to hold engaging, active zoom meetings! A comment I often get is “this was the best Zoom workshop I’ve attended!” I’m sure the fun we have is a major part of that.
We will take standard zoom features and use them in ways you haven’t thought of, building on recent techniques being used by professional facilitators, with a Doug twist. You will leave with more than a couple of new tips and tricks (but NEVER underestimate the value of a good tip or trick!); you will leave with a new way of looking at teaching with zoom, and hopefully with a new enjoyment of your zoom-based classes.
I was trying to figure out how to do exercises that require vulnerability, like Step into the Circle if…..” When Doug showed us how to use the [hide non video participants] feature my mind exploded. I saw about 5 applications at once, ways to go deeper, how to develop connections. Was such a relief to this old war horse. I am about to turn 65; have been teaching since I was 22. Did not think I could expand my Wheelhouse with such excitement!
Suzanne Pullen
People have told me that they’ve left this workshop feeling energized, excited about using what they’ve learned, and confident in developing their own new techniques. You aren’t going to leave feeling overloaded or intimidated; you will leave feeling empowered and mighty.
This was great right out of the gate. … You gave practical suggestions and tips and modeled with super cool activities. I left higher ed and am now part of k12 but we run professional learnings every week to support teachers via Zoom and these will surely help us engage the participants and model for them how they can ramp up their efforts in using zoom.
Survey Repsondent
If you want to register for a workshop, sign up here. If you want to contact me, either to book a session for your organization, or to ask questions, or just to chat, click my contact link here.
I loved the extreme density of useful information in this presentation. So many of these pedagogy webinars (and I’ve been to quite a few at this point, some by very expensive and famous people) end up padding out 2-3 minutes of semi-useful insight with 60-90 minutes’ worth of time-wasting filler and restatement. By contrast, every. single. minute. in this workshop felt well-used and packed with genuinely new ideas. That has literally never happened to me before in any professional-development training, and gotta be honest, it was pretty refreshing to the soul. I also appreciated the psychological insight underlying a lot of the techniques we learned: rather than just focusing on cool tech tricks, this presentation felt as though it proceeded from a genuine understanding of how learners relate emotionally and cognitively to the Zoom experience. A lot of that likely proceeded from Doug’s improv experience, and I appreciated the opportunity to see how an experienced, charismatic performer would handle a lot of the techniques we discussed in the session. Finally, I appreciated that this session also achieved what it proposed to teach: it delivered an engaging , lively Zoom experience where I felt genuinely “seen” as a participant and felt myself forming active connections to the other learners present. Having had that experience is going to make it a lot easier to understand my students’ perspective as I work to build the same kind of rapport in my own classes this fall.
Survey respondent
I hope to hear from you soon!