Try These Zoom Presentation Tips from Garr Reynolds

Garr Reynolds is one of the world's foremost experts on presentation design. If you haven't seen any of his TED Talks or read Presentation Zen, put it on your to-do list. I follow Garr Reynolds on Twitter and this morning he Tweeted a link to a new video of his in which he explains why and how to use picture-in-picture when giving a presentation in Zoom. 

In Do This in Zoom to Make Amazing Visual Presentations Garr Reynolds explains why you should use a picture-in-picture style when giving presentations in Zoom. As you might expect, he uses great visuals to convey those points. After explaining why you should use a PIP style, he explains how you can create a PIP effect without using any external or third-party tools. 

After watching the video above, you might have questions about how to use slides in Zoom to create a PIP effect. Fortunately, Garr Reynolds has you covered there with another tutorial video titled How to Use Slides as Virtual Background in Zoom.

Applications for Education

It's probably worth noting that the methods Garr Reynolds presented in these videos might be a little cumbersome for daily instruction. As he points out in the video above, it's hard to use the drawing tool while using these methods. That said, these methods could be great to put to use for professional development presentations and presentations to school boards or other stake-holder groups. 

Yellowstone Distance Learning Opportunities

A couple of weeks ago I shared some information about Denali's Distance Learning Program for K-12 classrooms. This week I learned that Yellowstone National Park offers a similar program. 

Yellowstone National Park's distance learning program lets you schedule a twenty to forty minute virtual presentation with a Yellowstone Park ranger. Presentations can be scheduled for students to learn about geology of the park, the animals of the park, and the history of the park. Rangers are also available to talk about careers in the National Parks Service and more. 

Yellowstone National Park is in the mountain time zone. If mountain time presents a scheduling challenge for you, there are also recordings of ranger's presentations that are available right here on Yellowstone's Distance Learning page. Handouts and worksheets to use with the virtual presentations are available here. 

Here's a video of a Yellowstone distance learning presentation about bears. 

Host Web Conferences and Embed the Recordings Into Your Blog

Big Marker is a service that offers a free option for hosting online conferences. The service allows you to web conference (screen sharing is currently not available) in a manner similar to using the multiple callers option in Skype. Big Marker has a native recording option that you can use to capture your conference. Today, I received an email from BigMarker in which they announced that you can now embed those recordings directly into your blog or website.

Applications for Education
If you're looking for an alternative to Skype to use to bring virtual speakers into your classroom, give Big Marker a try. The native recording option could be great for recording that virtual visit and posting it on your blog for students to watch whenever they like

Use Slideshare in Google+ Hangouts

I've been a fan of Slideshare for years now. Slideshare makes it very easy to upload and share presentations. A couple of years ago Slideshare introduced Zipcast for presenting your slides online. Now you can present your Slideshare slides inside a Google+ Hangout. Last week Google announced that Slideshare is one of six featured apps for Hangouts.  Whenever you're in a Hangout you can select a Slideshare from the apps menu to share your slides.

Applications for Education
Ever since Google announced that Google+ Hangouts could be used by teenagers, Google+ has become more useful for academic settings. If you have slides in Slideshare that you want to present to a live audience, now you can do so in Google+. Students working in groups can use Google+ to get feedback from peers on their slides.

Four Ways to Give Short Presentations Online

Earlier this month I published a review of seven free services teachers can use to create and conduct online courses. Those services are good for on-going courses that contain a series of lessons. But sometimes you might just need a quick and easy way to give a short online lesson. In those cases you might want to try out one the following free services.

Big Marker is a good option for conducting online tutoring sessions, brainstorming sessions, and other online presentations. Big Marker allows you to create your choice of a private or a public online meeting room. If you make your room public anyone can join. If you make your room private you have to give participants a password to enter the room.  Once in your Big Marker conference room you can share screens, chat via text, chat via audio, or turn on your webcam so that people can see and hear you. Your Big Marker conference room comes with a white board that you and your participants can write and draw on. As the creator of a Big Marker conference you can control who can and cannot be heard or seen in the live audio and video chats.

Zipcast is a new service from Slideshare for conducting online presentations. Using Zipcast you can share your slides, talk to your audience, respond to your audience, and have your audience interact with each other in realtime on one page. The best part is you can do all of this without having to download anything. Using the free version of Zipcast your presentation can be private or public (a small ad is inserted at the bottom of your presentation). The premium version of Zipcast removes ads and allows you to password protect your presentation.

Scribblar is a free, simple service designed for creative, real-time collaboration. Using Scribblar, users can collaborate on the creation and editing of images and drawings. Scribblar also supports the use of mathematics functions in your whiteboard. If you have an image you can upload it to your whiteboard where you and others can edit it or comment on it. The commenting can take place directly on the whiteboard or in one of two side bar chat options. Users can chat in text or in voice. Using the voice chat feature and the mathematics function could make Scribblar a good tool for conducting mathematics lessons online.

Join.me is a free service offered by Log Me In. Join.me allows Mac and Windows users to quickly share their screens with each other and work together. To use Join.me you do need to download the Join.me client. Once you've downloaded the client you can start sharing your screen with anyone you like. Just give your nine digit access number to your collaborators to give them access to your screen and to converse with you. Use Join.me to share a slide presentation and chat or share scientific calculator on your screen and explain to students how to solve an equation.

Zipcast Makes It Easy to Give Online Presentations

Zipcast is a new service from Slideshare for conducting online presentations. Using Zipcast you can share your slides, talk to your audience, respond to your audience, and have your audience interact with each other in realtime on one page. The best part is you can do all of this without having to download anything.

If you're already a Slideshare user, you'll notice that when you're logged-in and looking at one of your presentations there is now a "Zipcast"link at the top of your presentation. Click the Zipcast link to begin giving an online presentation. Using the free version of Zipcast your presentation can be private or public (a small ad is inserted at the bottom of your presentation). The premium version of Zipcast removes ads and allows you to password protect your presentation.

Learn more about Zipcast in the Slideshare presentation below.

Introducing Zipcast

View more presentations from Rashmi Sinha.

Applications for Education
Zipcast could be a great way to offer online presentations to students and colleagues. Likewise, students can give presentations to virtual classmates around the world. If you've ever given a virtual presentation, you know that presenting online presents some challenges that you don't confront during in-person presentations. As more and more businesses embrace web-conferencing, it will become important for students to develop not only their in-person presentation skills, but also their virtual presentation skills.

K12 Online Conference Starts on Monday

The K12 Online Conference begins on Monday, November 30 with a pre-conference keynote to be given by Kim Coffino. The following two weeks will offer more than fifty virtual presentations from K-12 educators around the world. These presentations will be offered live and recorded for later viewing. The K12 Online Conference is a great opportunity to get ideas for strategies that you can employ in your classroom. You can visit the K12 Online Conference website to see "trailers" for the upcoming presentations. I've embedded below the trailer for Neil Stephenson's presentation, "Remixing in the Classroom: Engagement for History Students."

Find more videos like this on K12 Online Conference