Six Tips to Enhance Your Next Meeting

Whether it’s a professional development workshop or a plain ol’ staff gathering, you want to make the most of your time together. And freely available Web tools can help you do just that: make meetings more efficient and effective. The following are my top suggestions for doing meetings, 2.0 style.

1. Use a wiki to organize an event. Better yet, use a wiki to let others help in organizing. Create a blank agenda and let the attendees fill it in. A little hand-holding might be required, at least in the beginning, but your investment in launching a wiki will yield valuable results for the group, not to mention a huge savings in time. It’s one great excuse to start taking advantage of the free, hosted wikis for education available through Wikispaces.com, pbwiki.com, and Wetpaint.com.

2. Record meeting notes in a shared document, using a program like Google or Zoho Docs. These Web-based applications make quick work of even the most mundane tasks, such as recording attendance. Simply have those present add their names to a given line for that purpose. Various folk can also contribute to meeting minutes or other notes, usually resulting in a more robust record. Once your meeting is done, change the title of your document from “agenda” to “minutes.” It doesn’t get much easier than that. I like to highlight in yellow tasks or action items to help make reviewing easy during the next meeting.

3. Take digital photos of workshop attendees and add them to your wiki or shared document. You’ll be amazed at how much more readable and memorable notes are when you can see the pictures of those who were there. You can do this easily by using an Eye-Fi memory card, a nifty hardware tool that wirelessly and automatically loads photos onto your computer or online photo-sharing site. You can drag the photos onto your wiki or document from there. With large groups, I’ve asked people to write their names on a piece of paper and hold it up as I take their photo for easy identification.

4. Record your meetings or trainings by audio or video, then post them for those who were not able to attend. Grab a quality voice recorder—easily available from office-supply stores—and upload a podcast of your gathering. With a good webcam and free services like Ustream.tv and Mogulus, you can stream live video of your meetings for the benefit of remote viewers or participants, and record them as well.

5. Start a social network around a meeting or workshop. A social network with a good discussion forum allows you to take or continue the conversation online. Free, social network provider Ning (www.ning.com) is really good for this (full disclosure: I do consulting work for them). If filters block your access to social networks, set up an email group through Google or Yahoo Groups.

Ready to really push the envelope? There’s back-channel chatting, a synchronous side conversation to the actual event, which you might consider actively encouraging. A standard IM or chat client, including Skype, or a Web-based service like Chatzy, is all your participants need to get this going. Most of these programs allow users to save the chat for later review. Moreover, this practice can stimulate valuable ideas, questions, or other input from more reticent meeting goers who might not otherwise jump into the discussion.

The big meet up for the K–12 technology tribe occurs this month in San Antonio, TX, and that’s NECC, the National Educational Computing Conference. A highlight is the all-day EduBloggerCon, which takes place Saturday, June 28, at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. Drop by—in person or by tuning in online— to this user-generated event for educational bloggers, with a heavy-hitter list of attendees. www.edubloggercon.com/NECC+2008. Or stop by “NECC Unplugged,” the three-day conference within a conference held in the Bloggers Cafe and other areas. Come watch (or sign up to deliver yourself) five-minute speed demos, mentoring sessions, and much more. www.neccunplugged.com.

Bottom line: Using these tools can lead to a tangible increase in productivity when duties and responsibilities, and ownership of the event, can be shared across a group. Try these ideas at your next gathering and participants may very well clamor for more (gasp) meetings.