Tips to keep remote meetings productive

Photo: Anna Shvets/Pexels
StatePoint Media -- With many offices continuing to function remotely or hybrid style, video conferencing will remain a mainstay of the American workforce for the foreseeable future. Here’s how to ensure your meetings stay professional and productive:

Be Mindful of Limitations
Miscommunication can occur during an in-person meeting, however, there is a larger margin for error in a video call. Be mindful of the limitations of remote meetings and encourage participants to address who they are speaking to by name to avoid confusion. Consider assigning a moderator to help prevent interruptions, as well as someone to take minutes. This can ensure key takeaways are understood by all, particularly if tasks are assigned during the call.

Embrace its Benefits
While video calls do have their limitations, they also have a number of key benefits too. Features like screensharing make it easy to share presentations, data and analysis. Meetings can be also recorded for future reference or shared with colleagues who were unable to attend. And, while the mute/unmute button should never be abused, having this feature does give moderators the ability to make it clear who has the floor at any given time so that meetings stay structured.

Employ New Tech
The right technology can help ensure your staff is not overwhelmed with calls and video conferences. For example, Motiv, a mobile dashboard powered by Eturi that tracks productivity metrics for team leaders, now has a new Google Meets feature offering deeper insights specifically into meetings and calls. Is the time allocated for reoccurring meeting being used effectively or can it be optimized? Are the right team members using ad hoc meetings to brainstorm and collaborate? Who is meeting with who, when? Using this feature, CEOs, managers and team leaders can have these questions answered so they can make informed decisions. To learn more, visit motivapp.com.

Your team may be decentralized, but collaboration is just as important as ever. With the right habits and tools, you can run more effective meetings, and work productively together from afar.

Make online learning easier, three useful remote learning tools

StatePoint Media
Photo by Matthew Henry from Burst
The past year has demonstrated the importance of digital learning. And thanks to a variety of tools and resources that helped make remote instruction a little less stressful on everyone, teachers, students and parents quickly adapted to the changes brought on by the pandemic.

Music

Music has been a particularly difficult subject to provide instruction for at a distance. However, educational foundations have risen to the occasion by creating a trove of resources to aid learning. For example, the Save the Music Foundation provides free activities for families, tools for educators to create their own online tutorials and more.

Mathematics

Remote learning has only added new challenges to an already difficult subject. The good news is that online tools are helping fill the gaps created by the new normal. Check out the Casio Cares education site, which is chock full of free math resources for students, parents and educators. Tools include emulator calculator software, curriculum support materials, live webinars and remotely-delivered teacher training. Plus, Casio’s free all-in-one web-based mathematics software, ClassPad.net, which is geared for K-12 and beyond, delivers an accessible, interactive and personalized approach to mathematics. Its functions include graphing, geometry, calculation, statistics and more.

In addition to online activities and video tutorials, Casio also offers a weekly educational webinar series focused on mathematics on its YouTube channel, covering such subjects as elementary and middle school math, algebra I and II, geometry, pre-calculus, calculus and statistics. All webinars are recorded and can be accessed any time.

Creative Writing

English and creative writing teachers are turning to new platforms to help build their student’s writing skills in a variety of creative genres. One example is Storybird, which features hundreds of courses and challenges. If your child’s teachers haven’t caught onto the trend, no worries, parents can also sign up for an account for their children.

Even after classrooms reopen nationwide, one thing is certain, with so many amazing resources available to help educators teach and students learn, digital learning tools are here to stay.


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