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Education Connection
The Most Underutilized Feature in Successful Zoom Presentations
By Ted Janusz
Thirty million PowerPoint presentations are
that they were the only one to not accept your
environment, many of them are now being
place breakout room sessions throughout your
created each day. Given our current pandemic delivered via Zoom. But when giving a virtual presentation, the most underutilized feature
for success of a Zoom meeting presentation is breakout rooms.
It may be because breakout rooms do not appear with the standard setup of a Zoom meeting. You must enable them before your presentation. Why Are Breakout Rooms So Important?
invitation to join a breakout room. So, strategically presentation. Have one early on in the session,
and keep your participants guessing as to when
All in all, the use of breakout rooms in your Zoom meetings is worth heavy consideration.
About the Author
the next breakout room session will be!
Ted Janusz, MBA, facilitates
For a three- or four-hour virtual presentation
workshops, and has presented
(which is about the maximum length that most participants can endure a virtual presentation), include two breakout room sessions before a
halfway point break, and then one or two after the
more than 4,500 hours on relevant business-related topics internationally. He is a dynamic keynote speaker that helps to
break.
improve businesses and business relationships and can be
success of your Zoom presentation depends
You don’t want to overdo use of this feature, either.
reached at ted@ januspresentations.com.
participants and not about you. While the content
mental break from you. (Remember that you know
success of any presentation is how you make a
think about it. Thinking can be hard work, which is
It goes back to Presentation Skills 101. The on how you make the event be about your
Use it just enough to give your participants a
is important, the most important factor in the
your material, but they don’t. They are having to
connection with your audience. Remember that
why many people don’t like to do it.)
unlike in a physical environment, your competition is now just a click away!
If your virtual presentation is not interesting and
engaging, participants can always have it running in the background, while they check email or
Instagram in the foreground. If you don’t actively engage your participants, you may never know. That is the beauty of the breakout rooms.
When you utilize breakout rooms in your virtual
presentation, the participants never know when
you might next call on them to join in with you on your presentation.
With one-way communication, and especially with a recorded webinar, they know that they can step
What Do Participants Crave and Miss Most? The answer to the above question is human
interaction. Many of them have not seen their
colleagues, possibly in months. Even if it is not their regular associates on the virtual platform, many are just happy to actually see other
adults besides those in their houses during this quarantine.
I have delivered 58 three- and four-hour virtual presentations. And while I would like to think I
delivered stellar programs, the feature of those
programs that gets the most rave reviews from participants is the breakout rooms.
Tips To Improve Remote Presentations ■■ Double the number of PowerPoint slides from a live presentation for visual learners because participants no longer have you as the presenter using your entire body to help make the presentation more engaging and interesting. ■■ Enable multiple monitors, so you can have separate windows on the screens for PowerPoint, participants and chat. ■■ Choose to display an uncluttered, professional background. (I viewed an online presentation where the presenter had gray hair and chose a gray virtual background. I watched as his hair disappeared and reappeared as he moved his head. It definitely took away attention from what he had to say!)
away from their screens, possibly for an hour or
Another challenge for virtual presenters is to
repercussions.
is primarily what presenters miss most about
■■ Have natural light or ring lights positioned in front of you, so that your face is illuminated properly.
It may seem to be more efficient to use your
reactions. Most of your audience will not want to
■■ Buy the latest webcam to deliver a crystal-clear image.
from you. However, if you have a breakout room
■■ Upgrade your microphone for a cleaner, richer sound.
even longer, and that there will probably be no
presentation to simply dump content, but you are
probably looking to be more effective. Participants are more likely to retain information from a presentation they feel they were a part of.
get the audience to turn on their cameras. That a virtual presentation: seeing the participant
let you into their lives if they feel disconnected session early on, they probably won’t want to be the only participant in the room with their
With breakout rooms, participants probably do not
video off. Then they are more likely to leave
talking, laughing and joining in the fun, and they
especially if they anticipate another breakout
want to be embarrassed that everyone else will be
the camera on for the rest of the presentation,
will be missing out. They will not want you to know
room session coming up soon.
12 • Vol. 13 / Issue 4 • International Surface Fabricators Association
■■ Position yourself on the screen so that you fill most of it and appear more intimate with your audience. Technology already separates you from your participants, so you don’t want to look like the size of a postage stamp in your setup.
