Categories
online meetings

Dancing with himself: Beauty and tragedy at a kindergarten Zoom dance party

My five year old had a dance party with some other kindergarteners from his class at his school, and in some ways it was just brilliant.

He’s been a real trooper during the lockdown. Every morning he watches the video lessons his teachers have uploaded the night before. He prints out the day’s worksheets, and always dutifully gets through them. He says he actually doesn’t even mind staying inside so much, as he has declared himself to be an “indoor person.”

But it has been rough for him not to be able to just hang out and be silly with his friends every now and again, like kids need to do. When we learned his whole crew was feeling lonely, the idea to have a zoom dance party was floated, and immediately well-received by all.

Categories
team.video

Introducing Team.Video

Team.Video is built for remote teams, by a remote team. We’d like to introduce you to the product – which is now in open beta.

We built Team.Video with two foundational principles in mind:

  1. Team meetings should be as inclusive as possible; and
  2. Team meetings should be as efficient as possible.

On inclusiveness

Everyone can be seen. Our default video layout is a grid. Everyone can see everyone else, without fiddling with their layout settings or paging through a carousel or scrolling a strip.

Everyone can be heard. Teammates can always be heard with great quality audio. There is a bandwidth saver mode for folks on poor connections, which preserves audio at all costs.

But what about folks who are less inclined to speak up during a meeting? Chat and non-verbal feedback is built seamlessly into Team.Video – folks can raise their hand, give thumbs-up and thumbs-down, defer to the group or indicate that they are conflicted. This requires less weight than waiting for a good time to un-mute and interject, encourages participation from everyone, and keeps the conversation interactive and flowing smoothly.

On efficiency

Efficient meetings have a defined objective, start and end on time, and the takeaways are clear to everyone. Team.Video provides scheduling (integrated with Google Calendar), timed agenda items, and collaborative note taking.

Of course sometimes agendas can change – we’re all thoughtful humans. Team.Video agendas are collaborative, and can be built ahead of time or modified in the -call (items can be added, removed, rearranged, their timing can be adjusted, and external resources may be added). Of course, the our collaborative note-taking feature is in the call interface as well – no more switching away from the call to take notes and record your do outs. When the meeting is over, you can download the notes to continue the work.

At the end of the call, everyone is emailed the agenda, notes and resources of record, and they can be re-visited anytime in from your Team.Video workspace. Notes may also be exported to Google Docs.

Welcome to Team.Video

We’re excited to invite you to our open beta. When you sign up for a workspace now, you get unlimited team meeting minutes, a custom domain for your team, room permissions (private, knock to enter, public) and an experience that we believe will have you coming away saying, “this was a better meeting”.

Please give it a try, it’s free for everyone during the pandemic.

We welcome any and all feedback on the product. Thanks for reading.

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