We're excited to announce a new webinar series, "What's New at MURAL". Every first Wednesday of the month, we'll highlight some new features and share some tips to help you put these features to work.
Here's the recording of our first webinar in the series:
Templates
Does it seem like you do the same activities with your team again… and again… and again? Re-building each of your custom frameworks in a completely blank mural wastes time. Good news: you can now customize murals as templates to get started faster.
To build a template, start with a blank mural. Use shapes, titles, and connectors to define the steps for your activity. Number your steps, and make sure you've got enough space for everyone to contribute.
After you’ve laid everything out, select everything and lock it down.
When you’re done, you might have something like this:
To make your newly-minted template available to your team, go to the drop down menu in the upper left corner of your MURAL and select “publish as template”.
After you publish your template, you’ll notice that everything’s frozen. This prevents anyone from altering or changing it. You can then add sticky notes, images, videos, and more on top of the template that you’ve built.
When your team wants to use this template for an activity, go to the “Templates” section, find your template, and click on the arrow in the right hand corner. Click “Create mural from template”, and start working together with your team.
Learn more at our support site, and check out our longer webinar, "Creating Team Activity Templates in MURAL".
MURAL for mobile
Have a teammate away from their computer during a collaboration session?
Send them the URL for the mural you're working on, and they can contribute on the go.
With MURAL for mobile, you can invite your teammates to contribute ideas on sticky notes through their own mobile devices.
Or, you can use it like a notepad. If inspiration strikes while you’re away from your computer, you can write it down on a sticky note on your phone, and it will send it back to a mural.
This is a limited application. You won’t be able to see the full version of MURAL or browse through other murals. However, you can type, change the size and color of the sticky note, and soon: sketch.
When you’re happy, click ‘send’.
Back in the full version of MURAL, you’ll notice a mobile inbox in the right corner. This is where the sticky notes from mobile devices are delivered. Just drag and drop the sticky notes onto your mural, and carry on as usual.
Ty running a brainstorming session where everyone adds ideas on their mobile devices while the main MURAL is projected on a larger screen.
Adding content by Right Clicking
You can now upload files more quickly by simply right-clicking in an empty area of a mural and selecting "Upload files".
You can upload files from your Dropbox account or from your computer.
This works in reverse, too: if you have a couple of images in your mural that you’d like to add to your Dropbox, right-click on the image and click “Save image to Dropbox”.
Adding ideas from spreadsheets
You can add ideas from a spreadsheet into a mural - go from a rigid spreadsheet to malleable, moveable sticky notes.
Select and copy the cells you’d like to add. Then, simply paste (CTRL + V) the cells in your MURAL.
The content from the cells will appear as individual sticky notes in an area. You can change the title of the area, or delete the area and work with your ideas more freely.
One last tip for remote collaboration:
Feel a little closer while working remotely: have everyone take a picture of their workspaces and add them to a MURAL.
Talk about your spaces, point out some interesting details, and get to know your team a little bit better.
You can read more about this exercise and pick up a few more remote collaboration ideas in this article from 18F.
Thanks for reading, and see you next month.
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