Zoom Training for Podium Presenters

We’re about three weeks out from GCMAS2022, so things are about to start happening relatively quickly. One such thing is Zoom training for anyone presenting at the podium.

In most conferences, one simply hands a thumb-drive to the AV person with the correctly named file sometime between an hour and 15 minutes before ones session begins. However with online conferences things get a little more complicated. We’re constantly thinking of contingencies… what happens if you are presenting, and your network goes down? What if you haven’t got the current version of Zoom? What happens if you have other technical difficulties? Or even, what if you have laryngitis that day and can’t speak? We aim to have plans in place for all of that (or most of it, anyway), in order to give you a good conference experience.

So we ask that people who are presenting sign up for a training session to go over some of these contingencies, familiarize you with how the tech team plans to handle them, and to ultimately try and make the experience as seamless as possible. We are offering four different days at different times of day to try to accommodate as many as possible:

• Monday, May 23rd at Noon EDT
• Tuesday, May 24th at 4pm EDT
• Thursday, June 2nd at 6pm EDT
• Friday, June 3rd at 10am EDT

What generally happens at such sessions is that Natalie, our Zoom wizard, will take you through a few key things to do to ensure that if you have a live presentation it will go well. Last year, maybe a third of attendees stuck around to ensure that their presentations loaded correctly and that they felt comfortable ahead of time, and then we hung out and answered questions. For some folks it was fifteen minutes, and for others as much as one hour. Since Zoom has been upgraded and there are some other minor differences in things this year, it is still worth coming.

So how do you sign up? This year, just email me: tim.niiler@gmail.com and let me know which date you wish to attend.

Then how will you get into the session? In keeping with our practice from last year, I will place links on the program page which will be accessible to you once you’ve logged in – with the idea being that this is practice for getting to the Zoom room from which you’ll need to present.

I look forward to seeing many of you again sometime in the next couple of weeks!

Tim Niiler & the Tech Team (Nat & Sam)