Introduction: How to Use Miro for Training
If you have been using PowerPoint to drive your presentations, you are aware of the problem: “Death by PowerPoint”. It’s time to learn how to use Miro for training. Slide after slide, novels worth of information, and participation mostly happens when you cold-call someone. It’s not effective, and it’s most certainly not what anyone would call engaging.
Miro is a digital whiteboard platform that gives you a different option. Instead of moving through a linear deck, you build a path. Participants travel through it with you, stopping at different points to interact with the content rather than justwatch it go by.
Here is how to actually set it up.
Start With AI
One of the more useful things Miro has added recently is the ability to generate board content from a prompt. Instead of building activities from scratch, you describe what you want, drop the prompt into Miro’s AI Sidekick, and let it generate the structure for you.
The build will not be perfect out of the box. You will spend some time adjusting sizing, colors, and labeling. But the hard part, figuring out the layout and the logic of the activity, gets done in about a minute. For a facilitator trying to build a board before a session, that matters.
Build Engagement Into the Path
The real difference between a Miro-based session and a PowerPoint-based one is that engagement is not an add-on, as it often is in many presentations. Instead, you embed engagement into the board’s structure.
A few things that work well:
A few things that work well:
Drag-and-drop sorting activities are a good opener. Give participants a set of pre-made sticky notes and two columns to sort them into. It takes 60 seconds, teaches them how to interact with the board, and gives you a read on the room before you say anything substantive.
Polls let you ask a question, collect votes from participants, and see the results play out in real time. All without the hassle of switching tools or waiting for participants to drum up the courage to come off mute and participate! Just build the poll on the board, start it when you’re ready, and your group can easily vote from any device they prefer. It’s that simple and engaging!
Open-ended sticky notes provide a quick and enjoyable way for people to contribute without speaking. Ask a question, and participants will take a blank sticky note from the stack and type a two-word answer. This process moves quickly and typically generates discussion-worthy responses.
Share Files Directly on the Board
If your session requires you to share a handout like a document, PDF, or spreadsheet. You can drop this directly onto your Miro board. It keeps everything in one place and eliminates context switching, which tends to kill session momentum. There are some formatting restrictions that you will have to work through in certain circumstances. But overall, it’s a very good way to share the files without having to stop share, and reshare a different window or application.
Connect Your Stops
Once you place your activities, use Miro’s arrows to draw connections, or a pathway between each of your “stops”. These arrows provide participants a visual map of where they are in the session and where they are going next. It sounds like a small thing, but it changes how the room experiences the session’s pacing. They are not just waiting for you to move to the next slide. They can see the path.
Is It Worth the Switch? Conclusion:
This approach will not be right for every session you deliver. If you are delivering a quick update or a short informational briefing, PowerPoint is probably fine. But if you are running a workshop, a certification session, an onboarding program, or anything where you actually need people to think and not just listen, Miro gives you tools that a slide deck simply does not have.
The learning curve for how to use Miro in training is real but short. Most of the setup happens once, and once you have a board structure that works, you can reuse and adapt it.
If you want to see the full build process, including the AI prompts, the engagement activities, and how the board came together for a real conference session, watch the full video here:
How to Use Miro Instead of PowerPoint to Run Your Next Training Session
And if you want more practical resources like this, the Free Corporate Trainer Crash Course is a good place to start.
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