Welcome to my blog! Today, I want to share my experiences and insights from running live virtual classrooms, particularly focusing on the technologies that enhance our learning environment. As a professional Scrum trainer with Naked Agility, I’ve had the opportunity to facilitate numerous classes, and I’ve learned a thing or two about making the most of our digital tools.
Embracing Technology in Virtual Learning
When I first started running live virtual classes, I noticed that many students felt a bit overwhelmed. Not only were they grappling with the concepts of Scrum, but they were also navigating new technologies. To ease this transition, I’ve been using two primary tools: Microsoft Teams for video conferencing and Mural for digital whiteboarding. Let’s dive into how these tools can enhance your learning experience.
Microsoft Teams: Your Virtual Classroom
Microsoft Teams is a powerful platform that allows us to connect and collaborate effectively. Here are some tips to ensure you have a smooth experience:
Download the App: I highly recommend downloading the Microsoft Teams app rather than using the web version. The app provides a much better experience, especially for our two-day classroom activities.
Logging In: When you connect, use the email address I invited you with. This could be your corporate credentials or a Microsoft account. If you encounter issues, don’t hesitate to reach out to me for assistance.
Navigating Teams: Once logged in, ensure you switch to the Naked Agility Limited account in the top right corner. This will grant you access to all the features we’ll be using during the class.
Joining Meetings: You’ll find a join button for meetings in the channels. Even if no one else is in the meeting, you can still join and get familiar with the environment.
Breakout Rooms: We often use breakout rooms for group activities. You’ll be able to switch between the main room and your team’s room seamlessly, allowing for effective collaboration.
Mural: The Digital Whiteboard
Mural is another fantastic tool that I’ve integrated into my classes. It serves as a digital whiteboard where we can brainstorm, collaborate, and visualise our ideas. Here’s how to make the most of Mural:
Accessing Mural: I’ll share a link to the specific Mural we’ll be using in class. Once you’re in, you’ll see an outline on the right side, which helps you navigate through the content.
Creating Notes: You can easily add notes by double-clicking anywhere on the board. Customise your post-it notes by changing their colours to keep things organised.
Facilitator’s View: As your facilitator, I can summon everyone to specific points on the Mural, ensuring we’re all on the same page during discussions.
Timers and Voting: We’ll use timers for our time-boxed activities, and I’ll facilitate voting sessions to gather feedback and ideas from the group. This interactive approach keeps everyone engaged and involved.
Preparing for Class
I’ve found that the first half-day of class can feel lengthy for those unfamiliar with these technologies. To combat this, I conduct a tech check before we dive into the content. This allows everyone to familiarise themselves with Teams and Mural, ensuring we can focus on learning rather than troubleshooting.
Conclusion
Incorporating tools like Microsoft Teams and Mural into our virtual classrooms has transformed the way we learn and collaborate. By embracing these technologies, we can create an engaging and interactive learning environment that mirrors the dynamics of in-person classes.
I hope this overview helps you feel more prepared for our upcoming sessions. Remember, the goal is to learn and grow together, and I’m here to support you every step of the way. If you have any questions or need assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out. Let’s make the most of our time together!
Hey, welcome to running a live virtual classroom. My name is Martin Nature Wood. I’m a professional Scrum trainer with Rhonda Dark, and I run our company called Naked Agility out of Scotland. Naked Agility is available for DevOps and Agile training.
Okay, so I’ve been running a number of live virtual classes. I’ve run two so far, and I have noticed that when students first come into the class, it can be a little bit difficult and daunting, not just maybe learning Scrum for the first time, but also learning new technologies for the first time. So I wanted to cover the two technologies that I will be using in my trainings. One is Microsoft Teams, as I’m using that for video conferencing and for some communication channels, and I’m also using a product called Mural for digital whiteboarding to get some of that feel of an in-person class.
So first off, Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams is a tool from Microsoft that allows us to create calls. One of the first hurdles to get over is connecting to Microsoft Teams. We do recommend that you download and install the app rather than use the web version. It gives a much better experience during the class. The web version is good if you’re just joining a meeting for a short period of time, but we’re doing two full days of classroom activities, and really having the thick client is important.
When you connect, open up Microsoft Teams. It’ll ask you to log in. You should log in with the email address that I invited you to the class with, and hopefully that will be the same as your corporate credentials, or it might be your Active Directory credentials from your corporation, or it might be a Microsoft account, like the same thing you log into Xbox or Skype. If it’s not one of those email addresses, it might be your Gmail or whatever. You will be asked to enable that as a Microsoft account. Just like Google does this as well, you’re able to enable any email address, regardless of what platform it’s from, as an account you can use to log into Microsoft services. So it’s just a case of setting that up.
If you’re coming on under an MSA, I do recommend that you use your corporate credentials if you can. If you need to change your email address because your corporation might block your ability to log into Teams as a guest, then please ping me, and I will change your email to something else, and you may come in under an MSA.
So let’s take a look at Teams. Teams is not the simplest application in the world. It does come with a lot of features, and we’re only going to be using a small subset of those features. But it’s useful to get just at some of the nuances of how you connect in. Now, you might have joined Teams using a meeting invite, and when you join using a meeting invite, you’re coming in not as an authenticated guest, which means that you don’t have access to some of the tools that we’re going to be using.
What you want to do when you come into Teams is, on the top right-hand side of Teams, next to your profile picture, there will be a little drop-down list, and it should say your company name if you normally log into Teams with your company. You should change that drop-down list so that it says Naked Agility Limited. That’s my company. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see…
So just reordering that. Here I’ve got a live virtual PSF on the 1st of January 2015 for my demo account here, and what I’ve done is created a single meeting that everybody in that team will have access to. So what will happen is I will add you to the team. I’ll invite you to the team. You’ll get an invitation request via email. Click the link, follow the instructions, and then you’ll be able to come in here as a fully fledged guest in my Teams account.
Now, once you’re in here, if you click on any of the items that have this little symbol here, you’ll be able to go in and open the meeting, and in the top right-hand side, you’ll have a join button. So even if nobody else is in there, you will have a join button to be able to get in. If you click join, because you’re already authenticated, it will just allow you to have access right away.
So I’m going to turn my video off so we don’t get confused by what’s coming up here, and I’m going to join now. Okay, let me make myself a little bit smaller. There we go. So once you’re connected to the team, you’ll obviously see the carousel of people’s videos. You should have both a short conversation and a sure participants enabled, and if you do not, you have not come in under an authenticated account. You’ve come in under an anonymous account, which can happen. But if you come in under an authenticated account, Naked Agility Limited, then these buttons will be enabled for you.
One of the things that we’re going to do as part of the team is we’re going to work in breakout rooms. This is the main channel that will be open all day. This is where, when we get together, we have our big room events with however many people are in the class, and everybody will be in this room. Most people will sit with mute on. When people start talking, at the moment, you can only have nine videos in a gallery, and whoever’s talking will be one of those nine videos in the gallery. If you have a particular interest in an individual, you can right-click on their picture and pin it to the gallery so that they don’t disappear.
But what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to go over here onto the left-hand side, and you’ll see the Teams button again. If you come in not authenticated, you won’t have this. You should open Teams, log in, and switch to Naked Agility. But if I click on Teams, I’ll go back to the main view where we’re looking at the team. The call will be in this little display here, so whoever’s talking will have the picture, the one picture you can have there. Then you’ll see down here that this team has two channels: General and Team X. The General channel has a little icon to see that there is currently a meeting underway in that channel. If you go in and click on that channel, you’ll see here that you’ll have a big join button because the meeting is currently underway, and the same option to click through into the calendar item and start it. But because it’s already started, you can just join it and go straight in, which is really powerful.
When you’re instructed to, you have particular exercises that are done in Teams. Each team will have maybe Teams 1, 2, 3, 4. Maybe they’ll have names. It depends on the type of class we’re running, but each of those teams will be listed here. I’ll be creating them during the class, and if I click on this team, you’ll see it’s currently empty. It was brand new; it has nothing in it. But we want to create a space for that group of people to be able to interact. If there’s not one already, you can actually click Meet Now, and then it’s actually helpful if you put in the name of the team and then whatever else you want after that, and you can just click on Meet Now.
So now I’m in our second team meeting. Oh, there we go. So there’s my… let us turn the camera off again, otherwise somebody might freak out. You can see on the left-hand side here that the other main room has been put on hold. If I go back to Teams again, you’ll see that there’s two calls started, and I’m currently participating in Team X, and I have Main on hold. This means if I just leave these calls open, so I don’t click hang up when I change between calls, I can actually just go here, click play, and now I’m in the main room. So if I open up full screen, now I’m in the main room, now I’m in Team X.
Now I’m in the main room, so I can very easily and quickly switch between those rooms. We normally run with multiple facilitators, so there will be somebody to help with this. But once you get to grips with it, you went to the team room for a short period of time, you pop back out when we’re doing the main exercises, and it flows pretty well. It’s a very quick transition.
Now, one of the things that I can do is you’ll see you’ve got a little short conversation at Wendell here in the main room. If I want to send you some information while you’re in that room, I’m actually able, without joining the room, to go in here and hit “Time is up” to let you know to come back to the main room. When I send that in your Team X meeting that you’re having a discussion at, this short conversation will actually light up, and you’ll see the “Time’s up” in the meeting chat on the right-hand side. That’s a very quick way for me to do that. You may not notice. If you don’t notice, give you a moment, then I’ll pop in and say, “Oh, we need to come back to the main room,” because I’ll be able to switch between multiple teams as well. I typically run this class with between 10 and 20 people specifically for the PSF, and I always have at least one additional facilitator to help make sure you can switch between those rooms effectively.
In addition to that, so I went too high on those two calls. Now hang up those two calls; they’re finished. At the end of the class, you’ll be invited to join the Professional Scrum at Community team here. This is a team that everybody that has gone through one of my classes is a member of, and in here, there’s some interesting chat, but there’s also access to the course where you’ll have a direct link in the email that I send at the end of the class. If you use Teams to access this files and data, for example, if I open up the PSF, you’ll see a list of the course where that has been available, and I make the PDFs available for each version of the courseware that comes out. So I’m continuously updating this, so if you did take a previous class, you’ll be able to go in and get a newer version of the courseware when it becomes available. There’s some extra material in here available as well, and if you click on Class Media, you’ll have a folder for your team, your class, that only you and the people in your class will be able to access. That will only be visible to those folks, and it will have additional things like if we took pictures during the class, and if we used Mural and PDFed them or other things, then they will end up in that folder there.
In addition to that, I have a folder with all of the presentations that I do at conferences. Sometimes I’ll mention them in the class because it adds value to our discussion, but maybe not 100% relevant for everybody, so we don’t do it in the class. Plus, we only have two days, so you can go and see some of these presentations that have been done previously, and those recordings online as well on my YouTube channel.
So that was a kind of walkthrough of how we’ll be using Teams in the class. Hopefully, that was useful and will help you figure out how to get things going as quickly as possible. One of the things we do find is that the first half day can be a little bit lengthy when folks don’t understand the technology or haven’t used it before. So just this is just to give you a quick brief.
I think we need to have a look at the second piece of technology, which is Mural. Okay, so Mural is a digital whiteboarding tool, and it’s reasonably powerful. We’ve been using it quite extensively for classes. Both of the classes that I’ve run have used it, and many other Scrum trainers have used this class as well. Let me switch to Mural. Mural is available in the web. It has a number of pretty straightforward capabilities, as well as some advanced capabilities as well, and I’ll be sharing a link directly to the individual mural with you, and you’ll be able to go directly into that mural.
So this will just take a second to load. There we go. So this is the mural that I’ll be using for my class on Monday. Well, this is the kind of demo make a mass version of it. In this, you’ll see there’s an outline on the right-hand side. If you don’t have an outline, there’s a button to toggle the outline up there. We’ll start on preparation, where we’ll do some introductions, and we’ll figure out who everybody is, what we’re doing here, and that kind of thing. We will also have slides in combination with this as well. Just to note that if you want to take notes or you’re asked to add data to these pages, you can actually just double-click anywhere on any page, and it will put a post-it there. If you want to change your post-it colour, you can change it in here, and then you can add other post-its. If you do another post-it close to a post-it that you’ve changed, it will be the same as the one you just created. But if you do it next to other ones, that will be yellow, and that will be a purple circle.
So there’s a number of tools to be able to do that: text, shapes, drawing, images. You can do anything you like on there and just move them around and do a bunch of things with them. What I’ll be doing during the class as a facilitator, this is the facilitator’s view that you’re seeing now. I’ll be able to go in here, and I’ll be able to summon everybody to that point. So I’ll be instructing all of the students in the class, might be 20 people, to all go to the same mural, and I’ll see little icons down in the bottom for each of the students that are in here. When I summon everybody, they’ll come and see the same thing as me. They’ll have follow enabled on me, so you can see that somebody who’s left it open on their computer from the last class and has anonymous elephant, and our self aunt is now following me. So as I drag around, as I move around, they’ll have their display moved as well, and they’ll see exactly what I’m seeing. So we can talk about it; we can have discussions; we can talk about those capabilities.
In addition to that, this is just the main mural where all of us will be working. There’s also a separate team-based mural just for teams and for teams to work in for each class. Again, it depends on the class which murals we use. This is for the Professional Scrum Foundations class, and what I’ll hopefully be doing is I’ll be setting timers when we have time boxes. So even if you’re in your separate teams meeting, you’ll be able to see the timer. I would point out that the timer is JavaScript-based, and if you switch away from the display and then back again, the timer does not keep the correct time. So if you have more than one mural open and you switch between them, the timer gets out of sync with the real world. It’s a little bit of a bug in Mural, but I’m sure they’ll fix it at some point. Ultimately, having a timer that you set on your phone for the time boxes that are described will help a great deal and help us make sure we keep on track and come back, and we don’t have to chase everybody so much.
Quite often, we extend the first exercise, the first time box. We have a kind of team-building exercise at the start, and we often extend it just because first use of the tool, people need a little bit of extra time. So I’m going to end that timer, and when the timer is up, it will actually pop up a little message on your screen that says “Time’s up.” It’s not super obvious, but it’s not super hidden either. Then we will go back to the main room and maybe bring some of that discussion that we’ve had back to everyone in the organisation.
In addition to that, we might do some voting. Quite often, we maybe come up with five or six ideas for something, and then we want to have a vote on it. This is something that you can do in your team rooms as well. Actually, maybe you can’t, but you may have edit rights, but you maybe can’t do a voting session. That’s a good point, so ignore me on that. But we might do voting sessions as a group, so I will create a voting session. I’ll say how many votes everybody gets, and I’ll start that voting session. You can see you can click a card to add a vote and shift-click to remove a vote, and your voting is anonymous. Nobody else sees your votes until the end, and so we can begin voting. I can add two votes to one card, one vote to another card, and I have no votes left. I can see how we’re getting on, and maybe I don’t know. It’s a little bit anonymous who voted for what, but I can call out that there are three votes left from people. I’ll give it a set amount of time, and then I will end the voting session. When I end the voting session, everybody will see what are the stickies, what are the posts, what are the items that everybody’s voted on. This can be very useful for facilitating classes and Agile training.
Okay, so Mural is fairly straightforward. This is the mural that I created just as a playground for students. I usually do a tech check before a class, and I take them through and live this type of exercise, which maybe helps them really understand what it is they need to do. So I would very much like to have that many of you in my class. I’m going to be sending this video out to prospective students as a short introduction, and commit 23 minutes to get started with both of those capabilities: logging into Teams, working out with Mural, and then coming back to the main group. All of the murals will be PDFed at the end of the class and available for all of the students to download. It’s a very powerful tool.
Cool, so that was really everything I had for folks. That was Teams and Mural. I’m hoping that that will make it a little bit easier for you to get started in one of my classes or anybody else’s classes or training where they’re using Teams and Mural.
