Delivery Matters

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Multi-day agendas available in SessionLab

Ever since we released the first version of SessionLab, we received many requests to develop a better option to create multi-day agendas. It is a frequent scenario that a workshop or training session spans longer than a day, and previously the only option was to create two separate sessions for each day and then trying to manage them together in the multi-plan view. That was certainly a cumbersome way to deal with such sessions. We are happy to announce that support for multi-day agendas is now available in SessionLab! With the new feature, you can open separate days (day-sessions) under a session if you want to design a session that…

Introducing the new dashboard in SessionLab

Over the past months, we received a lot of suggestions about how to improve the dashboard, as it became harder and harder to have a good overview if you one many sessions created or shared with. Now we are happy to announce the new redesigned dashboard as the solution to always stay on top of what’s happening on your own or in your team’s workspace! What’s new there? 1) New views (Recent, Personal, Your Team) help you to find your sessions: you get an easy overview of what is in your Personal and in your Team workspaces. Besides, you can find a Recent view where you can always see your…

Liberating Structures now in SessionLab Library

Simple rules that make it easy to include and unleash everyone in shaping the future (or at least the next meeting) Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz sure had these kind of impressions and questions in their minds when they met in 2003 at Plexus Institute. They both had background in complexity science, improving organization’s workflow and learning methods. They shared a hunch that conventional structures (reports, presentations etc.) are too inhibiting while other techniques (brainstorming) are too loose. So building on a few methods they created Liberating Structures (the term itself is based on theory of power by William Torbert) that incorporates principles from complexity science, organizational development, improvisational arts,…

Rich text formatting, session activity indicator & library commenting ????P

We are happy to bring you the latest updates in SessionLab: Let your text become rich! - not only in content but also in format. Rich-text formatting is now available in the session planner, so you can apply bold, italic, underline and bullet point formatting in any section of your session blocks. Get to know in a glance if any of your sessions has been changed while you were away. If you work collaboratively on session plans, and your collaborators edit your session or make a comment while you are away, then an activity indicator ● will be shown on your homepage on the session card. Combine it with sorting…

Four-dimensional facilitation techniques

This is a guest post by Gwendolyn Kolfschoten. Gwendolyn is an expert on collaboration, facilitation and group processes. As a researcher at Delft University of Technology, department of Technology Policy and Management, she studied collaboration processes for a decade. She was also a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the Engineering Systems Division. She has published many academic articles on collaboration and on tools and technologies to support group work, among them four dimensional framework about developing facilitation techniques that this post is about. Currently, Gwendolyn is the founder a company dedicated to supporting effective collaboration and the author of the book Effective Collaboration. Like a real…

Find and organise your sessions better in faster-than-ever SessionLab

In this update we bring you a report on maintenance and some exciting teasers for the future. In the past weeks we’ve been busy improving the ‘behind the scenes’ part of SessionLab. As a result we got a faster and a more reliable platform than ever before. Of course, we included some new features as well that we know you’ve been looking forward to: Mark your client for each session: Now you have a dedicated field to enter a client of a specific session. This can help you filter your sessions and find the ones assigned to specific clients more easily. Less crowded dashboard: If you have a lot of…

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Use own private libraries and share sessions with a link

We are excited to introduce you the latest updates in SessionLab. Your Private and Team Libraries of facilitation resources: Do you have some favourite methods or exercises that you often (re)use in your sessions? Now you can add them to your dedicated Private Library in SessionLab, so you can quickly find them next time you want to use them! If you work in a team, a new Team Library can be handy to have a shared knowledge base of facilitation methods within your team! Add resources to library from your sessions: Next time you feel you have just created a block in one of your session worthy to be saved…

Team Canvas – Get your team on the same page

This is a guest post by Alex Ivanov. Alex and his team developed a simple-to-use and very visual framework called Team Canvas for teambuilding and team alignment that is available freely to anyone under Creative Commons licence. We are grateful to Alex for having shared this great tool with the facilitators’ community, and also glad to announce that you can find Team Canvas resources on SessionLab both in the library and as a Featured Session - so you can seamlessly integrate it in your next session plan if you decide to do so. On average, only 46 out of 100 workgroups within organizations end up creating value for companies, and…

Real-time collaboration, printing options and more

In today’s update we are bringing you an important feature that makes SessionLab a truly collaborative process design tool. Plus now you can customise your printouts. Here are the detailed descriptions of the new goodies: Real-time collaboration and editor rights: When you invite a collaborator for your workshop or training plan now you can work together at the same time on your plan. To do that you can give the new editor role to your collaborators which will allow them to edit all the plan details. The viewer role still remains for cases when you want to give only view and commenting rights to collaborators. Furthermore, you can see the…

More than 100 exercises in our new library

We are thrilled to introduce the SessionLab library of facilitation techniques. You can already find more than 100 handpicked exercises collected from free public sources that you can search and filter by suggested number of participants, length of exercise and topics. Once you have found the exercise that fits, you can easily add it to your session plans. Do you have an exercise that you would like to share with the community of trainers? Feel free to add your favourite exercises to the library. Our vision is to build the best public repository of training or workshop content knowledge and your contribution is more than welcome! But that’s not all.…

5 most useful free online sources for training activities

Good icebreakers, exercises, and energisers are essential for an engaging and effective training. It takes careful consideration to choose the right activities for your training, the ones that will fit perfectly with your learning objectives, group size, the profile of participants, and the time available. UPDATE We have added 4 more links that you, our readers recommended, so be sure to check them out at the end of the article. You may already have your favourite exercises for different training topics, but as you deliver more and more training, you do not want to use the same ones over and over again. Refreshing your exercises is good for experimenting with…

Trainers and coaches in the Netherlands: Share your digital tools and technologies used in training

Inspired by a recent blog post on lack of digital tools to support trainers and in our effort to promote sharing of practices and tips between trainers, we are organizing a first trainers’ meet up in the Netherlands. You can find below the description of the event and register on facebook or meetup.com. How can technology get you into the flow when preparing and delivering your training? How can you save time when managing your training? Technology brings plenty of opportunities for different professions, but what about the training field? Come, see and share your experience on how digital technologies can help trainers in their work. We would like to present some…

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