Technical Brief
Tools, room and timing for the three sessions, with a low-tech fallback for everything
Read this before your first delivery. It covers the practical side: tools, room, timing and what to do when the technology doesn’t cooperate.
Overview
Three 90-minute sessions, one week apart, for about 8–12 people (it works from 6 to 20; above about 12, run show-and-tell and pitches as a gallery walk). You need a screen, a laptop, a whiteboard, cards for the asks, and two free online tools. Every tool has a low-tech fallback, and the sessions work without any of them.
Tools and fallbacks
| Tool | Where it’s used | Low-tech fallback |
|---|---|---|
| Mentimeter word cloud | Session 1: “What do you remember?” after the bad slide | Shout-outs written on the whiteboard |
| Kahoot quiz | Session 2: retrieval of Session 1 | Read the questions aloud; answers on mini whiteboards, scrap paper or fingers held up (1–4) |
| Mentimeter format tour | Session 2: the silly questions (multiple choice, 100 points, pin on image, ranking) | Hands up for multiple choice; sticky dots on a printed image; sticky notes ranked on the whiteboard |
| Menti or Kahoot (participants’ own) | Session 2 ask; Session 3 “try what you made” | The participant reads their questions aloud and the group answers by hand |
| PowerPoint accessibility checker | Session 1, redesign round 2. Also your own decks | Check by eye: text ≥24pt, strong contrast, no meaning by colour alone, bottom of the slide clear |
| The deck | Every session | Printed bad-slide pack; describe the slides; the canvas drawn on the whiteboard |
The asks go on paper cards, written in the room and photographed on participants’ phones. No Padlet or shared board is needed. In the pilot, a Padlet link sent after the session went unused.
Free-tier limits
Checked October 2026. Limits change, so check again before each cohort.
- Mentimeter (free): unlimited slides, but 50 participants per month across all your presentations. Two sessions with 10 people can use much of that. Running two cohorts in a month, or Menti in all three sessions, may need a second account or a paid plan.
- Kahoot (free schools plan): up to 10 players per game. Workplace plans have different limits. With more than 10 people, play in pairs on one device, which also adds discussion.
- Participants’ accounts: for the Session 2 ask, participants make their own free account. They can use either tool. Suggest Kahoot for quiz-style retrieval and Menti for opinions and word clouds.
Setting up
- Make each quiz or presentation in advance. Test the join code on your own phone, on mobile data and on the guest wifi.
- Embed links in the deck with a QR code and a short URL on the slide, so nobody switches windows mid-session.
- Kahoot: use “classic” mode. Afterwards, download the report: it is part of the Level 2 evidence.
- Menti: keep the presentation open in a second tab, ready to go.
- Accessibility checker: in PowerPoint, Review → Check Accessibility. Run it on your own decks before every cohort.
- No patient information goes into any free tool. See the governance box in the Evaluation Toolkit.
NHS realities
Plan for these. Several of them happened in the pilot.
- Wifi. Guest wifi may block quiz sites or drop out. Test in the actual room. Participants on mobile data usually get through when the wifi doesn’t.
- Blocked sites. Kahoot or Menti may be blocked on trust networks. Check with IT a week before. If blocked, present from your own device on mobile data, or use the fallback.
- Locked-down laptops. You may not be able to install anything, log in to personal accounts or plug in your laptop. Bring the deck on a USB stick and in your email or OneDrive. Have the PDF version too.
- Small screens. The “projector” may be a TV. Keep slide text ≥24pt, sit people so they can see, and have the key slides printed.
- Fixed furniture. A fixed round table works fine for pairs and show-and-tell. Don’t plan anything that needs the room rearranged.
- The whiteboard. Bring your own whiteboard pens. Check every pen before you write: in the pilot the board was written on in permanent marker.
- No device, no slide. Some participants won’t have a laptop or a slide. Bring the printed bad-slide pack. Redesign on paper (a storyboard counts).
- Digital skills. Don’t assume them. Print the Computer Task Sheet, pair people by confidence, and demo anything you ask people to do on a computer.
- Ratio. One facilitator works with about 4–8 people. Beyond that, bring a co-facilitator: one person stuck on a computer task stalls the whole activity.
The room
Bring every session:
- Laptop, charger, adapter for the screen, deck on USB and in the cloud
- Whiteboard pens (tested) and a cloth
- Blank cards for the ask (Sessions 1 and 2) and printed canvases (Session 3)
- Printed bad-slide pack (Session 1; keep it handy in Session 2)
- A visible timer
- Sticky notes and paper for the fallbacks
Each session blueprint has its own list. Arrive 20 minutes early: nothing on screen when people walk in.
Timing
Each session is 90 minutes. Don’t extend it; plan to finish on time. Theory comes in bursts of 10 minutes or less, just before it’s used. Set a visible timer and stop when it goes.
If you are running behind:
- Cut show-and-tell first. Take two or three examples instead of everyone, or switch to a gallery walk.
- Shorten the pitches in Session 2 to 30 seconds, or take half the room.
- Never cut the ask. In Sessions 1 and 2 it is written on a card and photographed before anyone leaves. In Session 3, protect the follow-through loop and the reveal.
Between sessions. Keep messages short: people drown in email. The pre-session messages are on the Pre-Session 1, Pre-Session 2 and Pre-Session 3 pages. Assume nobody read them: each session opens by reading back the ask in the room.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a teaching qualification to run this? No. See Train the Trainer for how to get ready.
Can I run all three sessions on one day? No. The week between sessions is part of the design: Session 2’s Kahoot is spaced retrieval of Session 1, and the asks need time to happen.
What if participants didn’t do the ask? Ask “what got in the way?” with curiosity, not blame. Then use the bad-slide pack or the room’s examples. Barriers are useful data.
Can I adapt it for my setting? Yes. Keep the spine, the asks, the canvas and the one-week spacing. Change examples, clinical contexts and tools freely.
The tools are blocked and the screen is tiny. Can I still run it? Yes. Every block has a fallback above. Say what happened and carry on: teaching under real constraints is part of the point.