This week's experience of designing and hosting a webinar was 100% new for me. Here I hope to dig into the challenges and rewards of the process. Here is the link to watch a 12 minute clip on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_o9nbyGCnBk
As expected, the hardest part was thinking of something to do! What was my webinar going to be about? At first I thought to do something school or work-related, but that quickly faded and instead I decided that discussing a personal hobby would be a more natural fit. I have been a very amateur woodworker for a few years now and I thought it would be fun to host a webinar where I share how to create something with wood for free or quite cheaply. In the last five or ten years, people have been obsessed with pallet wood projects and so for this I decided to highlight a different material, plaster lath. Normally I am on the other side of this kind of video, watching someone else teach me how to do a skill, so this was something new. The second challenge was thinking about audience. I invited many of my family and close friends for this. Dr. Dembo's advice held true...only a fraction of those invited attended. On a whim, I also made my webinar public to see if anyone would happen upon it. No one did, but it was worth a try. I decided to use Google Hangouts as a free webinar program. It offered both live video feed and a chat space for question and answers if necessary. One challenge that I had to think about prior to hosting was how to deal with the flow of conversation. In Google Hangouts, anytime someone speaks their video stream or avatar dominates the screen. The text chat stream is also not present by default, so I had to 'lay the groundrules' for the webinar at the ouset. I asked each person to click to show the text chat stream and to click a video tile at the bottom of the Hangout so their video wouldn't keep jumping back and forth depending on who was speaking at the moment. I also gave them the instructions that questions could be spoken or typed. Even though I said this, I did forget to check the text stream frequently to see the questions being asked and to respond timely. This is something I now know for future webinars. Technical issues like lighting and the use of props was something I tried to prepare for but turned out underwhelming. I didn't realize that when not enough light is present, Hangouts will switch to a black and white video stream which presented issues when I was trying to show some color variation in the wood I was using. I also prepared all of my tools and props nearby, but the video would have had a more convincing feel if I had hosted in my workshop instead of my living room. It would have also had better lighting in my shop, but my wifi would not reach that far. Overall, I feel that the webinar went OK. I typed up a loose script that I had offscreen on my iPad. It helped but even though I practiced several times I did lose my place and had to refer to my script. I am glad I had it. Seeing as my family was in the audience, I did field a few questions jokingly. If I were doing a webinar professionally, I would have kept my jokes to a minimum. I like Google Hangouts for what I did in this webinar. I also think it would work well for my students because they all have Google accounts in our school district, so no personal accounts or emails would be shared. It also has the ability to be streamed over the phone which is convenient. One of the members of my audience was participating on a phone and it seemed to work well. If I decided to host a webinar in my class or have students host, I would highly recommend using Hangouts. I valued having this experience and would do it again. I really enjoyed being an audience member in a webinar. As an avid YouTube viewer, I think the added participatory nature of the webinar makes it appeal to me. Being on the other end as the host was a bit unnerving, but I welcome the challenge and the opportunity to put myself outside my normal comfort zone.
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