Virtual regional meetings – Adapting to life in lockdown

The Thames Valley Group held their regular monthly meeting as usual in March, thanks to some timely advice from Paul Vincent in IT, OCA Tutor Jayne Taylor and the OCA Europe group, who have been maintaining remote contact for a while.

Work was loaded up to OCA’s Padlet in advance, so attendees had a chance to review and make comments or prepare questions before the meetings. We used OCA’s Zoom account for our meeting, which proved more stable than the Google alternative, allowing us to have a relatively large meeting of 13 people with no real issues. Users were also able to exchange comments via the Chat facility, which can be archived along with a video record of the meeting. The latter is, however, a very large file.

Padlet allowed participants to make comments on each other’s work along with general comments on how the meeting went, and feedback was very encouraging. Since the Padlet can be archived it remains as a record of the meeting and allows presenters to extract comments at a later date to help with their studies, without needing to note things down on the fly.

It was great to be able to feel connected to the Group even in these difficult times, and we are looking forward to our next meeting.

Featured image: Photo by Junior Teixeira from Pexels