My friendships with my nieces and nephews are among the most treasured ones in my life. I'm super interested in them, curious about them. I love talking with them, listening to what they say, and collaborating on projects together. Not being able to visit with them has been one of the worst parts of COVID for me.
With them quickly growing up (all five of them are six and under) I wanted to do something to keep these relationships alive through 2020. Working closely with them, their parents, and technology, we have discovered some ways to do that.
Here, I'll share a way you can carry out a creative and joyful Zoom call with a child as young as three. I'll talk you through how to collaborate with a child on a drawing on Zoom. I've found my nieces and nephews are happy to spend 40-60 minutes doing this with me, with minimal support from their parents once it's set up, freeing their parents to focus their attention elsewhere.
The core idea: work together on a drawing
What makes this fun is the vivid experience of creating something together. I love the process of seeing a single creative and surprising drawing emerge on the screen, just through our conversation. In the process, we're practicing all kinds of amazing skills — storytelling, design, letters and numbers, and just how to talk and relate to each other. Sometimes there's even a helping of what educators now call "social and emotional skills," too.
Lots of adults say "I can't do art. I'm not artistic." You might find it liberating to know that the art won't come from you. All you are, are the hands for the child's vision. You'll just be making lines, shapes, letters, numbers, and colors through the process of asking the child what they want.
The simplest thing is to just open up a Zoom meeting, share your screen, and choose Whiteboard. That gives you a big blank space and a few tools you can use to draw all over it.
Questions you can ask to co-create a piece of art onscreen with a child:
What should we make?
What color should that part be?
How many of them?
Where is it?
What is this one's name?
How is it feeling? Why does it feel that way? What happened?
Where is it going?
What else do we need here?
What is the title of this?
There's no special technique for using Zoom's drawing tools, they are pretty self-explanatory. Iff it doesn't behave the way you expect, no problem. Messy is good. It's fun to be exploring something together. Use lines, shapes, rubber-stamps, write text, move things around, undo and so forth. Your conversation with the child is more important than how it ends up looking!
Taking it to the next level: drawing on a real piece of paper
After doing about a dozen of these drawing sessions with my three-year-old niece, I started to want more freedom than the Annotate tool could provide. So I started looking into ways I could collaborate with her on a real, analog drawing — a drawing on a real piece of paper.
Using real paper has lots of fun benefits:
You can use any kind of coloring implement you have, including pens, highlighters, crayons, real rubber stamps, etc.
You can use any kind of surface, like cardboard or construction paper or, really, anything. (I have some blank puzzles that are fun to drawn on, then separate, and then put together with a friend.)
The child can see your actual hands working.
You can also use stickers, staplers, PostIt notes or other neat things to add layers to your drawing
It seem obvious that it would be great for a child on Zoom to see your work surface and what your hands are doing, while also seeing your face and talking with you. It's actually not trivial to implement this, but with a little bit of effort you can do it. I think the effort is well worth it, because it opens the door to all kinds of wonderful, creative conversations with extended family. With some experimentation, I finally figured out how and I'm excited to share it with you!
The core idea is this:
You'll use your desktop Zoom connection just like normal so the child can see your face
You'll add a secondary device — your smartphone. You'll log into the Zoom meeting separately through your phone, which will be mounted in a small desk tripod so it can display a view of your hands and worksurface.
The nitty gritty details of the Zoom tabletop tripod method
For this, I'm assuming you're basically familiar with Zoom and how it works. If you're not there are lots of people who can help you with that!
Prepare yourself and the family
Get a tabletop tripod. This one works perfectly, and just costs $25!
Download the Zoom app to your smartphone and log in. You also need to turn off the audio connection. Go to Settings > Meetings > Auto-Connect to Audio and make sure it's off.
Create a Zoom link for the scheduled time and email it to the child's parent.
Right before the meeting
Start setting up for the meeting 15 minutes before.
Make sure your phone is charged
Put your phone on Do Not Disturb. If you get incoming calls or notifications during the meeting, it will interrupt the video, so you want to stop those. On an iPhone, you'll find Do Not Disturb under Settings. Tap Do Not Disturb. Make sure that under "Silence" you've selected Always.
Join the Zoom meeting from desktop by clicking the invitation link. Switch to Gallery View.
Join the Zoom meeting with your smartphone. The easiest way is to open the email or text message you sent to the parents, and click the invitation link from there. When you join:
You may be prompted to connect audio. Hit Cancel. You don't want to connect audio because then you'll get a weird feedback loop between your desktop and smartphone audio.
Turn your phone landscape orientation. Looking at your desktop screen, you should see two versions of yourself, side by side, both in landscape orientation. You want it to be landscape so you get the biggest possible drawing workspace!
Keeping the phone sideways, place it in the tripod. Double check and see if it is right-side-up. If it's upside down, you can rotate the mount 180 degrees.
Make sure all your materials (paper, crayons, etc.) are close at hand.
You’re ready!
With that, you’re all set! When the child joins, after you're done with greetings and chats, and if they seem eager and ready to draw, Spotlight the video of your hands/paper. You can do this by mousing over the image of the paper, finding the "three dots" button, and selecting Spotlight Video.
Note, since your meeting will technically have three attendees (you, your hands, and the child) you'll be working within the 40-minute limit on Zoom calls if you have a free account. Forty minutes may be a perfect amount of time for this activity — but, I think Zoom should make this kind of three-way call free for families with kids!
Where could this go? The sky's the limit!
I believe our hands are potent and filled with healing energy. I believe kids are hugely interested in watching artful people who care about their craft using their hands to do skilled work. Even more important, they benefit from interacting with people who care about them and listen to them. Technology can help make this happen.
Adults and kids can explore crafting, knitting, sculpting, doing math, writing, measuring, geometry, woodwork, even music together on Zoom this way. Letting them see your hands, what you're holding, and where you're pointing, even adds a richer layer to reading a book together online, as they can see the pages and your fingers, too. It's personal, fun, interactive, and alive.
I noticed that kids point to things they see on the screen, assuming you can see what they are pointing to. It made me wonder...beyond this, what if we loving adults could also see the child's workspace, their hands, and what they were doing? I got so excited about this that I bought tripods for everyone in my family! I think there's huge potential here. But, there are also challenges:
Although setting up the tripod system is not that hard, those 15-20 minutes of setup time can be a heavy lift for busy parents who have a zillion things on their mind.
A parent would have to be willing to give up their smartphone for about an hour, which is a LOT for most parents.
Young children move around a lot as they work, and it's difficult for them to keep the materials they are working with within the Zoom frame. This can be addressed by using a taller tripod, or by taping out a square for them to work in with blue tape. Still working on these.
I hope a company will create a product/app that makes this whole thing way easier.
In the meantime, if you're apart from your dearest young friends during the holidays, think about how you can connect and spread your love through joyful creative conversations using the magic of Zoom.