Miro
What is Miro
Miro is a sophisticated online whiteboard or 'infinite canvas' that can be used by staff and students at Warwick for collaborative work. It has a broad range of features and is flexible enough to be used in many teaching approaches.
It has the ability to create and reuse templates for lesson activities. These can be copied by students and edited to suit the course requirements.
How do I get a Miro account?
- Open https://miro.com/education-whiteboard/
- Follow the instructions here https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017730473-Education-Plan
- As evidence of accreditation, please download this image (or screenshot https://warwick.ac.uk/services/gov/charity/).
Access
Miro can be accessed via a near identical interface across mobile, browser and desktop apps. It has proven to be very reliable in terms of connectivity.
Please note that whilst Miro has been approved by Information Security, it is not supported by IDG and given that we have no guarantee of its availability, we recommend that you do not design learning and assessment tasks that have a critical dependency on it.
Accessibility
Miro is not accessible as it does not meet the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard.
If you intend to use Miro you should:
- Consider whether an alternative approach would be more suitable.
- Ensure participants are aware of the accessibility issues before you use it.
- For example, share the link to Padlet's Accessibility and Padlet guide.
- Encourage participants to let you know if the accessibility issues will prevent them from full participation.
- Discuss mitigations with the participant or consider another approach.
- Ensure that text descriptions are present for any images.
- Where video is used, provide transcripts or host the videos on Echo360 or Microsoft Stream where automated transcriptions can be made available.
For more information on Accessibility developments you can follow this Miro community thread on Accessibility.
What can I do with Miro?
- Use pre-built templates or create your own templates and smart frameworks.
- Unleash your creativity and work the way you want to with an infinite canvas.
- Utilize sticky notes, freeform pen, shapes, arrows, smart drawing, and more.
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Get feedback, reviews, and approvals with multiple communication options.
- Easy screen sharing & and creation of presentations by grouping work into frames.
In our experience, Miro works like a cross between Padlet and Powerpoint but with more features than the former, and allowing more collaboration than the latter.
How is Miro used in teaching?
You can also see Robert's TEALFest presentation Future Learning Spaces Design Sprint in Miro - where he demonstrates the methods used in the IATL Introduction to Design Thinking module, and considers how they may be useful to teachers in designing learning.
Where can I get help?
IDG and Academic Technology cannot resolve technical issues with Miro. However, Academic Technology can support you to use Miro in your teaching. Contact Academic Technology via the online Help Desk.
Miro has extensive online help - we recommend using this to answer technical questions about installation, using the tools, adding templates etc.
- Getting started with Miro - all the basics, what is Miro, how to get an account, first steps in setting up a collaborative board.
- Using Miro - this covers the tools available, how to use a Miro board for collaboration, sharing boards, and a number of FAQs.
Clicking on the ? help button whilst in Miro itself will open a menu giving access to short video tutorials and links to FAQs, and to get help from the Miro community.