Zoom Series: Three Unique Ways to use the Zoom Chat 💬

One of our favorite ways to engage our participants in a virtual session is to ask them to use the Zoom chat.

Sometimes the chat gets naturally utilized, especially when you have participants who voluntarily supply their thoughts, quips, and observations with each other. When the chat’s not kicking off on it’s own, we like to provide some quick and easy frameworks for participants to get things going!

Chatstorm

Provide a prompt or question for participants to respond to but instruct them not to hit send until you give the go-ahead. Then, on your cue, everyone hits enter and fills the chat at once!

Chatstorms reduce the pressure that participants can sometimes feel when it comes to entering their responses into the chat, plus they reduce groupthink since everyone came up with their response on their own before being influenced by other people’s answers.

Decrease the social risk and increase variety! Win-win!

Direct Messages

When it comes to pairing people up to connect, most people think of breakout rooms, but we’ve found that the Direct Message feature on the chat can be a novel way to forge a partnership.

You can have partners send short text responses to various prompts you provide, Generate A List together in a quick brainstorm, or even play a game with each other!

One of the awesome Facilitators in our community Phil (check him out on Instagram @verticalplaypen ) shared the Rhyme or Reason game with us. To play, the first person throws out a word (ex. Blue!) and the other person has to reply back a word that rhymes (True!) or reasons (Red!) with it. Set a timer and see where the game takes everyone.

Group Notebook

If your session is more on the lecture or presentation side, have people use the chat as a group notebook.

Ask them to send things they want to remember, questions they have, quotes they liked into the chat. If you want to distinguish these from other things in the chat have them put ** before their group notes to make them easy to find later.

Sometimes, folks just need some specific instructions on what would be helpful to share in the chat. Whenever we provide some simple guidelines or examples we always find that the participation increases throughout the session—both in the chat and out loud!

The chat is unique to virtual sessions and with a few frameworks, we can transform it into a helpful log that can better reflect our participant’s reactions, questions, and takeaways.