Plan Engaging Workshops
In addition to your normal preparations for a workshop, we’re recommending you consider the following areas.
We recommend you use a video conferencing tool like Zoom to host your workshops. Depending on your number of attendees, other options like Google Meet, Discord, or Twitch might make more sense.
We are recommending Zoom because it seems to have the best bandwidth usage and features from the platforms we’ve tested. Upon scheduling your event, we will provide you with access to a premium Zoom account to use to host your workshop. These premium accounts will give you access to useful features like breakout rooms which are wonderful for one-on-one troubleshooting and pairing.
Whatever platform you choose, familiarize yourself with the controls before your workshop, so you don’t need to learn on the fly.
You should prompt your attendees for active participation. You’ll need to focus on keeping your participants engaged and active. We’re recommending starting with an icebreaker to ensure everyone knows each other. One of our favorite ice breakers is to ask each attendee to share their name, where they go to school, and something cool they learned about recently. You should also build time into your schedule to do breakout sessions, troubleshooting, and questions.
For Digital Events, if possible, encourage folks to turn on their webcams so that everyone can see each other. There may be some attendees who don’t have the bandwidth to connect with video. That’s okay! You may even have some attendees who join without access to a computer. If so, consider asking someone to cast their desktop so folks can follow along or cast your own.
As you’re working through the workshop content, be extremely aware of how intimidating code reviews and questions will be for participants. Remind participants that if they’re facing an issue others probably are as well. You’ll have to ask them to share their screen to troubleshoot their issues.
When you finish the material in your presentation make sure to sign off and thank everyone for their participation. It may be fun to continue hanging out with attendees. Consider working on other projects together.
Last modified 8mo ago