Putting Your “Phone” To Work
What does your phone have to do with facilitating groups?
Your ‘smart phone,’ such as an iPhone®, is a new tool for group facilitation and meetings. Increasingly, our phones are flexible and useful business tools. The iPhone, for example, offers several capabilities to assist your facilitation.
Meeting Notes
PDAs and cameras provide a handy tool for capturing white board contents. When work is completed on a dry-erase board or an easel, a camera expedites note taking.
Phone camera image quality is typically adequate to capture board notes, presentation images, and Post-It® notes.
Phone Sound System
Phones/PDAs are capable of delivering music, podcasts, and other recorded speech and music. Apple, for example, provides connectivity that enables the iPhone to connect to a TV or sound system (connectivity matrix for the iPhone and iPod).
Dock with A/V Output
Presentation Tool
On those days when you wish you could project a image during the meeting but didn’t bring a projector with you, you can use your phone.
An iPhone can be used to project images or video.
The Sparkz is a compact VGA-quality image projector. A VGA-quality projector works great for table-top presentations. The Sparkz (at time of this post) boosts a mere 15 lumens. (But, seemingly reliable with a bulb life of 50,000 hours.) Here is a short YouTube video demonstrating the Sparkz. (At our last check, the Sparkz was out of stock at Amazon.)
Honlai, a Taiwan manufacturer, designs and produces other portable A/V tools include a mini-LED projector, an iPod/iPhone LED projector. Their LED projector output ranges from 10 to 25 lumen, and resolution up to SVGA (800 x 600 pixels), includes speakers, and consumes a tame 25 W.
Did you bring your phone and your projector but need a suitable screen? Honlai also offers a portable projection screen. Honlai claims a viewing distance of as much as 4′ and weighs less than a pound.
Recording
Need to record an idea? A mission statement from a sponsor? Phones are increasingly capable of recording notes, ideas, and “to dos”.
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