Virtual Roundtable and the corona virus [SMD127]

Showcasing a virtual roundtable we did this past week because of meeting canceled due to corona virus concerns. How to do it, how it went and how your district can still hold roundtables.

Show Notes:

To develop a video cast I use an iPhone with internet connection, a Facebook Group with members, and present using a lavalier microphone (Amazon Link), and a tripod (Amazon Link), displayed behind me is a  projector (Amazon Link), on to a stand alone screen (Amazon Link). A second person was monitoring the chat, and relaying anything of importance. Don’t forget about the delay it will vary depending on connection but was about 10 seconds.

Transcript:

With all that is going on with the current virus situation scouting is challenged with finding a way through the problems associated with social distancing and the ability continue to give a quality program for youth.

For those that have not heard the concept of social distancing, it is the act of avoiding close contact and meeting within groups, which is unfortunately for scouting a big part of the program.

So, this Scoutmaster Dave’s program is about what we did this past Wednesday after non-essential gatherings were suspended. This coincided with when we were intending to hold our monthly roundtable, and as a roundtable commissioner I was told that we were canceling the meeting.

Now, I have been trying to get a roundtable through facebook going for a while, and have live streamed a couple of times this past year and there has been limited success in doing so. But as a roundtable commissioner I have seen it is harder and harder to get people to come out to roundtable. Some say it’s because many of the resources are online, some say it is the program that is run. That however is another discussion all together.

But I digress.

After speaking with our district commissioner about an idea of putting out a virtual roundtable this month instead of canceling it, he was on board, and our council staff was behind it as well, so I took to developing it online.

I contacted the cub scout commissioner, as I was the boy scout commissioner and we got together at my home to run the program. A big shout out to my wife Dvorah, Judy our Cub RoundTable commissioner and her husband Angelo who helped make it a great program.

Fortunately I was not starting from nothing, I had a facebook group set up already, it has a decent amount of members and as I do the Scoutmaster Dave videocast I had all the equipment I needed to pull it off.

For anyone thinking about doing this, the general setup was my iphone to capture and stream via Facebook’s free live stream tool . This is available on the facebook groups page, with a click of a button, so it was super easy.

Here’s a little snippet of the video

In our set up I had the camera set up on a tripod and pointed at a central point with a projector running with our roundtable program.

As facebook is not really designed for this type of presentation, it was a bit difficult as other presentation services let you have a video display and show your slides. But since we didn’t have this, only the video, I projected it behind me and worked through our presentation.

Normally when I present slides at roundtable I have a projector, a clicker to advance the slides and a screen to project on to. But if you don’t have any of this you can make a flip book, with print outs of pages, and manually flipping the pages as you go through it. In fact, depending on your set up, having this on the desk next to you might even work out better, and the slides might be clearer.

Another important point of the presentation was having my wife monitor the chat, and interject, so there would be some amount of 2-way conversation going on. Note however, there was about a 12 second delay, so stopping, waiting for comments along the way was helpful.

The good thing about this is that you can save the session for others to view later on Facebook. While it’s not the same as “Live” it does get your content out there, which is really the point though anyway.

Now lets take a look at a few seconds of the stream for context.

Take what you like and leave the rest, and as we say in Woodbadge, feedback is a gift, leave yours below in the comments, with the hope we can all learn together.

I’m Scoutmaster Dave, and this was a little on a virtual roundtable. As a personal note, I wish you all safety and good health as we as work through this as scouting community.