Randy Dean shows how to run a brainstorm on Zoom's whiteboard, where multiple people can draw, add text, and react with hearts and stars at the same time. He walks through the drawing, text, and spotlight tools, then saves and exports the finished whiteboard for later use.
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All right, hi everybody, this is Randy Dean taking a quick little break from this beautiful spring day here in Michigan where I was obviously out doing a little bit of yard work to give you yet another cool little tip on a way you can use Zoom. And this is particularly neat. We learned this when we were doing a client program with one of my university clients recently. About how you can use the whiteboard option for interactive group broom— brainstorming. Easy for me to say. And once again, I'm Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert, and what I want to do is show you— this is remarkably cool thing that you can do here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch up into the thing, and I'm going to switch from showing screen to showing whiteboard, and I'm going to hit share. And this brings up the whiteboard option, as you can see, and I've already done a little bit of prep to set this up. And notice that you I'm a big fan of this mind map technique. It was something I believe, the author's name, Tony Buzan, or, and it's been something I've been using for years and years whenever I'm doing a brainstorm. And the way you set it up is you put the main topic of whatever it is you're going to do here in the middle, and then what you start doing is little sidelines from this middle area where you're throwing down all the ideas, and if there's associations, you make the associations. This whiteboard screen works particularly well for that because you've got these drawing tools up here that allow you to do lines. You can do text. You can erase. You can do highlighting and spotlighting. You can put in stamps. You can have a lot of fun here. It's got some cool tools that make this a really nice platform for brainstorming. But now let me show you what's super cool. You can invite more people to be part of your brainstorm. Notice I'm here in the background. I've got me and me. Wait a minute, let's try something here. I'm gonna switch to Randy 2 over here. Hi everybody! And now look at this, when I'm over here, I have the option to come up to the top and hit Annotate. And when I hit Annotate, what happens, which is pretty cool, is now I have the ability live during this thing to come in here and add in my comments. Idea number 2. So see, I'm not the presenter on this screen. I am actively adding in idea number 2, and I actually have access to the drawing tools myself. So if I want, I can come in and throw in a line to idea number 2. And, you know, if I want, I can say stamp it with my little heart to say I really like my idea, or a star. To say that I think this is a great idea. I can add an idea off of yet another item here by saying, "Oh, well, here's my add-on to idea number 1." And so what you could do is you could have multiple people all integrating onto this single idea. In real time. So now this is me and me. But what's interesting about me and me, I could be over here as this version of Randy while idea number 2 is coming on the screen. I could in real time add in idea number 3 right here with my text. So as you can see, this thing can be going— idea, that's funny— idea number 3. Now what's interesting is what you can do is obviously you can have a whole bunch of people all integrating onto this at the same time. And what happened was I wasn't sure that it would work this way when we were doing this for the other client. I was bringing up and showing how the whiteboard works. I didn't know that we could have all these other people using the annotate tool in their function. Let me show you what happened once we figured this out. This is what happens when you've got a whole bunch of people annotating simultaneously. Now Natalie, question for you. Can you take over as host and can you draw on this whiteboard? We could try it right now. I've got it on my screen. Can you draw on this whiteboard? We can actually try it and see. I think this is an interesting little test.
Yeah, it doesn't look like I have the tools.
Yeah, I didn't, I didn't think you would be able to. Oh wait, Lisa jumped in. Look at this. Oh, thank you, Lisa. Now, how did— Lisa, what did you do? Did you just go up and grab the text? Can we open up Lisa's line and ask her how she did that? That's fantastic. Yeah, she's using Annotate.
Oh, okay.
Interesting. Okay, now what's cool about that, which means I could set this up like we did here, I could be drawing lines and people could just be dropping in. Oh, isn't that interesting? That's where my hearts came from. People could be dropping in text around this while I'm basically just drawing the lines. Look, we got somebody drawing in here right now too. So this tells you the answer to the question. Yes, we can have multiple people on this whiteboard. That's—
yeah, and it looks like the annotate button, for those that are interested, is up in the view options. And then it's Zoom Ratio, Request Remote Control, or Annotate is where you can find that.
That's actually super cool. I'm excited to see that we are able to do this.
Yeah, so it's great to test it out.
It looks like some people are playing too much. Love it. Any other questions that you have out there? Oh, look at this. This is going crazy right now. I'm loving this. Now, when you get the complete program done. Something else that's interesting here, take a look at this. Up at the top of the screen, you have an option to hit Save. And when you hit the Save option, here's all your drawing tools and everything. When you have the option to hit Save, you can actually save the whiteboard. And so it says it's saved, but, um, you can hit Show in Folder. You can actually save it so that it is part of your tool cabinet. And so like, let's say I want to do this one over here and I see something on here that I want to get. I can actually save from this side too. So what you can do is once you get this together, you can actually make this work. And let's say you put something out there and you're like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't have wrote that." You can come in and erase that part. So you can also hit undo. You can do formatting, change colors. You can have your own unique color. You've got stamps, you've got spotlights. All of these things make this where you could have a lot of fun. Per what you just saw happened with my other client as we were doing this. And so I'm gonna say goodbye. Have some fun with these tools. They're really fantastic. And let's finish this thing up here. I will pop back in, and let's go back to sharing screen so that I can finish up the presentation here. Let's go to the next slide. And I want to say thank you for your time. Hey, let's move me out of the way. That's what I should look like when I'm doing something professional, not in the ball cap ready for working out in the yard. If you'd like to find out a little bit more about what it is that I do, including my programs and even online full-length streaming and webinar programs on a numerous set of time, email, and technology-related management visit my website randalldean.com. I am once again Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert. If you like this video, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, and if you'd like to get a whole series of bonus productivity PDF tip sheets, go ahead and send me an email randy@randalldean.com. Put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll send you a whole suite of additional little PDF tip sheets, some of which link through to my other YouTube videos that you can then use and share with people on your team to help them get better with their time and email management capabilities. And with that, I'm gonna say thank you for your time today.
