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…

  1. 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.PowerPoint's Presenter Screen
  2. 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…
  3. 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!