So I Did This Webinar…
*This particular post is for my Webinars and Synchronous Learning Events course.
So I did this webinar…on emotional intelligence…and I actually very much enjoyed creating and presenting it! I thought I would be stressed out and nervous but I never felt that way. I’ve always loved the design portion of any project and I love presenting and holding a captive audience (willing or otherwise – doesn’t bother me!) so I’m not sure why I was worried. Maybe because this specific situation would be graded? In any case, I really enjoyed this assignment and I learned a few things along the way…
- PowerPoint 2016 has some fantastic presentation features: I have two monitors at home where I do my school work (an extremely worthy investment) and they were incredibly handy when using PowerPoint’s presentation mode. I was able to have my presentation running on my right monitor while the left monitor showed me my notes (script), the current slide, what slide/animation was coming next, and several additional features like tools to draw or write on the screen and even zoom in on a specific element. See my screenshot below to see what I mean.
- Practice every aspect before you present: I was worried about the technology aspect, especially since so many fellow students in my course had encountered issues with their technology. So I asked my ever-willing husband to go in the living room and be a participant of the webinar from in there. I ran through the presentation a few times with him and made sure I understood everything (or almost everything) that could go wrong. In the end, my only technology issue stemmed from me starting a new meeting and waiting in that one alone. Luckily Canvas sent me an email right away telling me that I had participants waiting for me in another meeting! When I clicked the link in that email, it opened up the correct meeting and everything was under way. This leads me to…
- Know your webinar tool inside and out: When I did make it over to the right meeting room, it looked like I only had one person joined along with me. I felt a little bad for not acknowledging the other two people right away, but it was because I couldn’t see them in the participant webcam pane. I didn’t realize that when I shrunk the screen, it removed all other participants from view. It’s a really simple thing, but it caught me off-guard and flustered me a bit.
Well there you have it, a few simple yet effective things to keep in mind when you present your next webinar. If you have 15 minutes to spare, learn a little bit about emotional intelligence in my webinar below! If you only have a single minute, then click here for a resource guide with a list of books, websites, and free emotional intelligence tests to take!