3 ways to show your slides behind you on Zoom
How can you show your slides behind you on Zoom? Right now, there are at least three ways to do this.
I’m not a big fan of using Powerpoint (or Keynote, of Google) slides in live-online training. But sometimes, they’re useful.
I sometimes use a slide to share written instructions for a breakout-room activity, especially with an international group where several participants don’t use English as a home language. And a highly-visual slide can sometimes be a super-efficient way to share a fairly complicated idea, such as our Web Events That Connect model.
But the problem is, slides are boring! From birth, human beings have a strong preference for looking at faces (and face-like things), even over brightly-coloured toys. And like other animals, our eyes are programmed to notice movement and change. It’s hard to stay focussed on dull, static slides.
When someone is presenting in the room, you get the choice to watch them, or look at the slide, and that works a whole lot better.
In this short video, I show three ways to achieve the same effect online, in Zoom. (I understand that one of the solutions, mmhmm, also works on other video conference platforms.)
From old judyrees.co.uk
David Hall
23 September 2020 at 15:35
Thanks Judy. The more we can bring our sessions to life the better for all…!
Enjoy!
Jen
25 September 2020 at 11:07
Great ideas. Thank you.
Pirjo
25 September 2020 at 11:15
Great, Judy! You are a gift to virtual interaction♥️ And the people in it!
No wonder they call you the Queen of it.
Caroline
25 September 2020 at 12:17
Brilliant info – thank you!!
Carina Silfverduk
25 September 2020 at 12:24
Would love to add that people who are native English speakers benefit from slides as well- especially people who are hard of hearing or who learn better with visuals/text and speech.
Alexandra Nadelman
25 September 2020 at 13:08
Thank you for sharing – this is so useful!
Mark Smith
25 September 2020 at 13:39
This was really helpful Judy, thank you.
Melinda
25 September 2020 at 15:55
Thank you Judy. I showed tge mmhmm app.to a couple of colleagues. They loved it. And we tried the other 2 options as well. They all work well and it is different.
Gordon Mullan
28 September 2020 at 16:29
There is another option – use OBS Studio, and pipe the output into your video calling platform as a virtual camera (similar idea to Mmhmm). It used to be a plugin for OBS but v26 (due soon) will support it natively. OBS is open-source i.e. free.
Does need a reasonably powerful PC/laptop, and has a steeper learning curve, but you can use OBS for recording videos and live-streaming to Facebook/YouTube/Twitch/etc. as well (it’s what the professional streamers use).
OBS gives you almost endless flexibility on what you include in your camera feed (animated/video transitions between scenes, live comment feeds as a separate element, scrolling banner text, etc. etc.
vanh
26 October 2020
thank you Judy, supper useful. I wonder if you and others in this community have any suggestions on how to deliver a presentation in a more engaging and less “one way” when you need to cover a fair bit of content before you can get to discussion point. Any ideas will be appreciated.