As a e-facilitator, it’s important to know what technologies are available nowadays, and how to effectively use them.
Apply your facilitation skills should be challenging in the digital world. To help you, we’ve researched and tested out many of the popular tools available. We summarized a list of the top digital facilitation tools and listed each of their benefits to help you decide which tools are best in order to generate engagement and full participation of your students.
We grouped the tools according to the type of tasks they are used for so you can find precisely what you need:
– Survey tools: Google Forms, Typeform, JotForm.
– Stunning Presentations: Powtoon, Canva, Prezi.
– Free video conferencing: Zoom, Meet, Zoho.
– Online whiteboards: Miro, Mural, Stormboard.
– Engagement and virtual facilitation tools: Mentimeter, Kahoot, Mindmup.
Surveys, Polls, and Data Collection:
If you ask for feedback from participants, then you may decide to create an online survey after your sessions. Alternatively, you can also conduct a needs assessment survey thus you can set up everything before your online sessions. Our online survey tools are:
Google forms: allow you to create unlimited surveys with 6 types of questions and skip logic that can guide your participants through your survey depending on their answers. It has a great advantage: Google Forms is absolutely free!
Typeform: Typeform offers unlimited surveys with a maximum of 10 questions and 100 responses in the free version. Typeform has made filling out forms engaging and interactive.
Jotform: Drag and Drop Forms in mins. JotForm is one of the easiest form builder available. It has up to 100s of free designs. Once your form is ready you can publish it anywhere.
Stunning presentations:
Information is important but it is also important the way how you show it to your participants. If you would like to create eye catching and dynamic presentations for your target group, we recommend you these tools.
Powtoon: Powtoon is an animated presentation and video platform for creating short informational videos and presentations about your brand or product. You can easily edit presentations and videos, add voiceover, and build a professional experience for your customers.
Canva: The platform gives you a bunch of presentation templates to use right away, and it’s very easy to customize them to your organization and presentation objective.
Prezi is another template-based presentation solution that you can use to create persuasive and engaging presentations with unique movement between “slides” and key points. Prezi maps out your whole presentation on an overall track that you decide, this allows your audience to visualize the progression of your presentation.
Free video conferencing:
Connect with your participants through an interactive platform. With the following free web conferencing tools you will be able to share your screen, record your meetings, collaborate in real time and much more.
Zoom: It is a cloud-based video conferencing service you can use to virtually meet with others – either by video or audio-only or both, all while conducting live chats – and it lets you record those sessions to view later. It has a free option.
Meet: Google’s popular messaging app offers an easy-to-use video conferencing tool that works really well even if you need to talk with people in different domains. It became well-known for its high video quality and for offering better quality calls when bandwidth is low.
Zoho Meeting:100% free for one host and one participant, Zoho Meeting allows for unlimited meetings and duration, desktop sharing, multi platform support, instant and schedule meetings, and instant messaging.
Online Whiteboarding and Post-Its:
Online whiteboards offer an endless flexible space where your participants can collaborate and share ideas. You can create an online canvas and use it for jotting down ideas. But what really makes whiteboards great learning tools is how they engage both the body and brain in learning process.
Mural: It is a versatile online whiteboard tool for remote team meetings. It is particularly strong as a team tool, allowing you to create different rooms for your board with differentiated access rights.
Limnu: It is for what a real whiteboard is for: sketching your ideas and sharing with other people quickly. Limnu is an efficient tool for problem solving and brainstorming between participants.
Stormboard: It focuses on idea generation, organization, and prioritization: You can add different types of notes, combine them together, comment in threads, and vote on ideas using colored dots.
Engagement and virtual facilitation tools:
Have you ever run a workshop or meeting where you wanted to quickly poll the opinions of all your participants? Workshops and training sessions are meant to be interactive, two-way communication helps to keep your group engaged. Having a meeting facilitation software that allows your participants to easily interact with each other can be useful in such cases – for instance to easily poll your participants and visualize the results.
Mentimeter: It allows you to create questions (such as multiple choice questions) in their web application and participants can answer them from their mobile devices. The great thing is that you can instantly visualize everyone’s opinion and display the results real-time to the group. It helps your participants to feel engaged, which is especially important for a large group workshop.
Kahoot: This is a game-based platform where students are encouraged to be leaders by researching, creating and presenting quizzes. They conduct research themselves on a given topic and also encourage their classmates to learn.
Mindmup: Create and share with your participants great mind maps. Capture ideas at the speed of thought. Mind map maker helps you to focus on your ideas and remove all the distractions. Create mind maps for free, and store them in the cloud. Your mind maps are available everywhere, instantly, from any device.