You can easily have your participants turn to their neighbors for a quick discussion using Seshboard's 'Turn to your Neighbor' feature. When you use Turn to your Neighbor, each of your participants will get paired with the individuals sitting immediately next to them at their table for a private conversation. Just like in an in-person setting, your participants will be able to see (but not hear!) the other people sitting at their table, while they converse with their neighbor. This is a great way to inject some quick and spontaneous interaction into your session without needing to send everyone off into breakout groups.
Starting Turn to your Neighbor
To start the Turn to your Neighbor feature, first click the "Turn to your Neighbor" button in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen to open the Turn to your Neighbor menu.
You can choose how many people will be in each discussion group by clicking the plus and minus buttons. When you are ready to start the activity, click the "Start" button.
Choosing whether to include hosts in the Turn to your Neighbor activity
If you would like to participate in a pair discussion with one of your participants, you can click-and-drag yourself from the stage to whichever table you would like to be a part of. You will then be paired with the person sitting next to you when you start the Turn to your Neighbor activity.
If you remain on the stage when starting the Turn to your Neighbor activity, you will be able to speak with all of the other people currently on the stage.
When there are uneven numbers of participants
By default, participants are paired with their neighbors according to the number of users per group that you have specified. If the number of participants in the room cannot be divided into groups of equal size, the remaining participants will be paired together with the final group in the circle. For example, if there are ten participants in the room, and you specify three users per group, then the system will create two groups of three participants and one group of four participants to accommodate all ten participants.
During Turn to your Neighbor
During Turn to your Neighbor, participants will not be able to hear what the people in the other discussion groups are saying. During the activity, all the other people seated at one's table who are not in one's discussion pair will continue to be visible, but their videos will appear in black-and-white.
You can easily "read the room" by clicking on each of the tables during the activity to see the conversations in action. The participants videos will continue to be shown in black-and-white, and you will not be able to hear the conversations as they are taking place.
Using other features with Turn to your Neighbor
You can combine Turn to your Neighbor with other features in Seshboard. For example, you can show a YouTube video to the group at the same time you're running Turn to your Neighbor - this is a great way to let your participants discuss the video you are showing with their neighbor.
You can also run a timer during the Turn to your Neighbor activity to timebox the discussion, or run Flash Polls, present PDF slides, and use Miro and Google Docs.
Stopping Turn to your Neighbor
To stop Turn to your Neighbor, click the "Stop" button on the Turn to your Neighbor menu. If you have already closed this menu, you can open again it by clicking the "Turn to your Neighbor" button in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen.