Online Community | Social Learning Space | Organizational Innovation

Mural has lots of features (so many that it can look a bit daunting when you first use it). But these are the ones we appreciated most in our workshop:

You can put LOTS on a mural (we put the agenda and activities all up in different areas on one mural). A mural size is possibly infinite and you zoom in and out of the areas you want to work on up close.

You can divide your mural into areas (and areas within areas).

You can link directly to these areas (and if you click on the link, that area of the mural fits your screen). This was useful for lots of reasons. For example, in a breakout room conversation on Zoom, the group can click directly onto a link that would take them to the area where they were going to take notes or work on something together. There is no faffing about “Where do we have to go now?”

There are two ways to navigate around a mural. One is with a small zoom in the bottom right of your screen where you can easily zoom in and out. The other is by using Outline mode (see right on the image above), which gives you the equivalent of a table of contents taking you to any object on the mural you have added to the Outline

You can export the whole mural, or one area of a mural to a PDF (or image file).

It has hundreds (millions?) of icons

You can use voting on a mural… just like putting sticky dots onto a flip chart paper.

Mural works great on an iPad.

Why we like Google docs (or Google drive)

We mostly like the combination of google docs and the other tools.

We put the agenda in google docs with links to specific parts of the mural (or other places) we are going to work on. The agenda is like “home base”.

We love (and I mean love) the way that everyone can reflect into the same google doc and see what others are writing at the same time.

The google folder with all the documents in it becomes a shared memory of the event created in real time.

Some practices that worked great