As a trainer and consultant, I travel approximately 50,000 kilometers a year by car. Since Corona, this has changed for understandable reasons, which is why I haven’t owned a vehicle for the first time in 30 years. Will I buy one again? Probably – either fully electric or at least a hybrid. As a confessed flipchart enthusiast, I also enjoy traveling to my clients by car because I can take a lot of material with me. This includes two camera bags that I have repurposed as moderation marker bags. Among other things, they contain 30 different flipchart colors, which I use to draw cartoons during or shortly before seminars, as well as create graphics, diagrams, and checklists. Participants appreciate this type of creative work. When I converted in-person formats to live online formats, the paper flipchart still played an important role. It is a familiar tool in an initially unfamiliar environment with cameras and virtually connected participants. This helped me to gain a foothold and feel comfortable in the new world of live online training. And only those who feel comfortable can lead a good training session.
At some point, however, I realized that I was using the paper flipchart less and less. It seemed increasingly forced to draw on it in between. This led to the idea of using a digital flipchart that would better fit the virtual setting for live online training, meetings, and workshops. My choice fell on the Flip 2, which Samsung provided to me for my work. The 55-inch display is approximately the same size as my classic paper flipchart, so it fits perfectly into the existing setup.
Digital instead of paper
Not only in size, but also in terms of functions, I can use the Flip 2 much like a paper flipchart. All the colors and pens I used to carry in my car are now available with a single stylus. I can mix any color I want for my charts. Skin tones for my cartoons are even stored as a default setting. That’s great!
The stylus on the Flip 2 writes almost like a real pen. There’s minimal latency, but significantly less than with other tablets or large screens. I enjoy drawing on it. This means I feel comfortable – completely without paper. And if I want to get truly artistic, I can even create digital images with oil or watercolors using the brush mode.
Many functions on one display
Trainers know this: you draw a specific chart and then add individual terms at the request of the seminar participants. This works wonderfully with the Flip 2. I draw the charts before the event and save them. The terms are then added live. The great thing is: I only have to draw the graphics once now and can then use and supplement them again and again. This saves a lot of time, and the participants still think it’s cool that I have hand-drawn pictures. Furthermore, it clearly distinguishes itself from online training and seminars that only use PowerPoint.
In addition, I naturally also use slides in my events. Usually, these are stored on my laptop. I can now mirror its display on the Flip 2. Thanks to the significantly larger display, I can use and annotate presentations while standing in a Teams meeting – and much more comfortably than on a much smaller screen. By the way: changes on one screen are transmitted to the other in real time.
Another application is opening an external whiteboard in Mural, Miro, or any other tool on the Flip 2. Participants do the same, so they can work independently on it, or I can enter things into Post-its, scribble, or create notes myself at their request, to name just a few applications. However, there is the disadvantage of latencies, meaning delays in transmission. I also spoke with an expert from Samsung about this. I confess, I didn’t understand everything, but at least enough to know that this problem has a lot to do with the different technical standards of providers. In short, the more you want to integrate your digital flipchart into normal applications, the more significant technical standards and compatibilities, or incompatibilities, become. This then requires a bit of effort, and not everything succeeds.
Hybrid meetings are becoming the norm
We will probably have many hybrid meetings in the future. This means some participants are on-site, others somewhere in the world. Therefore, we need a setup that meets both requirements: it must function analogously on-site and completely remotely. For such hybrid applications, a digital flipchart makes absolute sense: I can gather participants on-site and those who are not, on a white, digital sheet of paper. This is an invaluable advantage.
In this respect, I must honestly admit: I will probably not only drive less in the future but also buy fewer moderation markers. The Flip 2’s pen is completely sufficient!
Note: sponsored by @SamsungDeutschland #Advertisement. Samsung provided me with the Flip 2, and I would like to share my experience with it in this article. The article reflects my opinion and has not been editorially coordinated with Samsung.
