Giving a webinar – Lessons learned

Posted byCorinna Baldauf 2 Comments on Giving a webinar – Lessons learned

Last week I spoke at the 6th ALE Bathtub. The ALE Bathtub is an interesting format: It’s held approximately once per quarter  and each time 4 speakers present for 20 minutes each. The webinar format allows people from all over the world to tune in.
(ALE is the “Agile Lean Europe” network. I forgot why the webinar series is called “Bathtub”, sorry.)

Here’s my lessons learned:

  • You get to meet interesting people (organizers and fellow speakers)
  • We used GoToWebinar: Handling questions and the chat could be solved better, but it’s still a valueable tool
  • Trying the tech out beforehand pays off (feeling more secure and less fumbling around)
  • It’s weird to have no feedback whatsoever – Everyone but the presenter is muted and I closed the GoToWebinar panel (that shows questions and chat) because it irritated me on top of my slides. Very strange and disconcerting not to have any feedback loop
  • Prezi is not a good tool for a webinar – My audio broke off during every “slide” transition and I got to know this relatively late (see previous point ;))

For what it’s worth, you can find my talk about “Handling 3rd level support in Scrum” here.

A big thank you to the organizers and my fellow speakers for making this a very pleasant experience. BTW, the current organizers are looking for new fellow organizers 🙂

Published by Corinna Baldauf

Corinna Baldauf has filled every Scrum role there is and then some. Currently she spends most of her days writing and occasionally facilitating retrospectives. She's interested in lean, agile, coaching, leadership & UX. You can follow her on Twitter, subscribe to her (Retromat) newsletter and buy her books.

2 replies on “Giving a webinar – Lessons learned”

  1. Hi Corinna,
    its not a special problem of prezi, but its more related to the way GoToMeeting works with screen sharing. It tries to compress your screen to transfer it via network, and because your prezi transitions do a lot of screen updates there is lot of compression and data transfer going on.
    Happens as well with keynote and powerpoint.
    What I can recommend is to keep the Panel open. There is a view that will show you when all viewers see your changed “slide”. When I switch slides, i wait until i get that automatic confirmation back before i continue speaking. That slows me down, which is good, and listeners can follow along (which is even better).

    What you say with regards to feedback is right.
    Its kind of disturbing not to get any visual, or audible feedback. But you get used to it

    Fabian

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