Did I learn anything relevant to training from hosting my son’s 9th birthday party on Zoom?!

This weekend my son turned 9 and unlike previous birthday parties spent mopping up cake and juice from the floor of my kitchen / a village hall / backroom of a trampoline park / soft play (pick one) this year we hosted a zoom party with 20(ish) kids... But did I learn anything from it?

Make everyone feel comfortable

Given the amount of after-school zoom catch ups my son had with his friends during the first lockdown I had wrongly assumed that all the kids would just jump on and start chatting away like any other day. 

But actually they - like me - hadn’t necessarily been to a Zoom party before and there was a sense that this was something different. The added dynamic of me (the alleged grown up) being there, and the fact that none of us really knew if this was going to work out or not probably added to the tension. 

So to ease any silence I made an effort to make everyone feel comfortable. I asked them how they were, how the home-schooling was going, what else they’d been up to and so on. Very quickly they were feeling relaxed and chatting away which put everyone in the right mood for the rest of the party.

Making people feel comfortable at the beginning of a training session might seem like an obvious one, but it can be so easily forgotten in virtual environments I think it's worth a mention.

Explain what you’re doing and gain consent

After a few minutes I moved into explaining what we were going to do. I had a couple of activities lined up but I wasn’t necessarily sure how they’d land so I had some alternatives up my sleeve just in case. 

I wanted to see if there were any objections to the plan - some of the kids had been to another zoom party recently and there could have been things they thought would work / wouldn't work that would have been useful to know.

Luckily a scavenger hunt and a huge round of slightly competitive Pictionary sounded great to my audience so I explained how it would work, the sorts of things we could do and everyone agreed it sounded like great fun.

In a training environment it’s rare that you can rip up the session plan completely and start again on the spot. But there are usually opportunities to try things out with the group and ask them what is useful or not as you go. Too many polls? Try a discussion instead.  

Get everyone involved

There are probably loads of fun things you can do on Zoom that I haven’t tried yet - someone mentioned Bingo recently? But with 20 kids I thought the best way to keep them engaged was to get everyone involved as much as possible.

For the scavenger hunt we had written out lots of suggestions beforehand and put them in a hat to draw from. Some were very specific and a bit silly e.g. Go find a wooden spoon.

Others were broader to make it more interesting - Go find something that makes you happy. These broader finds meant we could ask the kids questions about what they’d found and why they chose it which helped everyone feel part of the group. 

In Pictionary we started with one of the kids drawing the first 3 lines of something they were thinking of and asking everyone to call out guesses. Then we gave them a 10 second countdown to draw a bit more before everyone guessed again. Everyone counted down together and the first person to guess wins. The countdown made it fun and we made sure everyone who wanted a turn at drawing had a go. 

Although not all of this last one applies to training adults I think it's fair to say that people are more engaged when they feel part of a conversation. Many of us think it doesn’t happen anymore, but people still regularly tell me about the ‘death by Powerpoint’ training session they saw recently - and that’s arguably even worse virtually! 

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So in summary I did learn and relearn a few training tips from hosting my son’s 9th birthday party on Zoom, but mostly we had fun and I didn’t have to clean up any cake!

Contact me at [email protected] to find out more about how LEO can support your Virtual Learning journey, or if you have a wooden spoon you’re dying to show off!