Guidance on using Virtual Flipcharts with your preferred virtual meeting software. Virtual Flipcharts are a free, simple and easy way of including a flipchart electronically in your webcam. They help engage participation and form a helpful, and easy to distribute record of the meeting.
Using your Virtual Flipchart in a meeting
Once you have set up your Virtual Flipchart on your virtual webcam, the next step is to try it out in your meeting software. Your virtual webcam is automatically active if you are using mmhmm, but you need to click the ‘Start Virtual Camera’ button in the controls panel if you are using OBS.
Then open Zoom or Teams. And as you come to join the meeting, make sure you select your Virtual Camera before you switch your video on. In Zoom this is done by the little up chevron beside your ‘Start Video’ button. And in Teams this is done by clicking the small cog on your joining screen, and then selecting the relevant Virtual Camera under Camera (In Teams, do not worry that everything is mirrored visually – it will appear the right way round to your meeting colleagues).
To switch off virtual flipcharts your webcam (and make it function just like a normal webcam):
- In OBS, under sources, click the eye symbol beside whatever you called your virtual flipchart
- In mmhmm, click the option for ‘slides off’
To bring it back when you need it, click the eye symbol again in OBS, or the ‘Shoulder’ option in mmhmm, and start adding things in your Powerpoint edit window. As you add more text, it will automatically resize to fit.
It is that simple. If there is too much for one flipchart sheet, then within the edit window, you can create further pages for your flipchart (simply use ctrl-m) and you can advance to them by clicking the Reading View window. Or, (another little PowerPoint trick) simply select the Reading View window, type the page number, and hit return, and the view will go to that page.
Furthermore, if you have pen input via a tablet, pen pad, or touch screen, you can use the ‘Draw’ ribbon to add your own handwriting directly to your flipchart pages, and to add drawings and diagrams as you wish.
At the end of the meeting, sending them the flipchart notes is as easy as sending them the PowerPoint file. Or you can immediately transfer the output into sticky-note content within a whiteboard tool like Conceptboard or Mural.
I have made all of this freely available in the hope of helping people to increase the participation and engagement in their meetings. If you believe that it will bless you in this way, all I ask is that you ‘pay it forward’ to bless others by publicising it in your networks.
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