Online Meeting Tips

As with any online meeting, prepare your host environment for an optimal participant experience – especially for your students:

Lighting

Minimize backlighting (open curtains, bright lights, etc behind you). The more your face is lighted, the better the image quality and your participants will see your friendly face better.

Dim ambient light may cause your image to be grainy or blurry

Outdoor images should have as little sky as possible due to its brightness

Too much backlighting Aah – just right

Background

The less cluttered, the better – minimizes distraction

Be conscious of what's behind you – are these things you want participants to see?

If it's in the background, have your TV turned off

Audio

Mute yourself when you are not presenting!

Due to poor bandwidth, audio may be distorted. You may need to enunciate more clearly and speak more slowly to be understood.

If audio is badly garbled – mute video (at the bottom of your screen) to recover bandwidth.

Obviously, a quiet environment is best.

Automatic closed-captioning is not available in Zoom* – this is available in Hangouts Meet only.

Motion

Keep your body movements as subtle and minimal as possible.

Avoid eating on camera.

Framing

Do your best to fill your image (frame) with your face when possible.

Personal Notes:

This can be a good opportunity to introduce your pets to your kids! :-)

Think of your online workspace as being your own mini video studio. Create a space that makes you, your students, and other participants feel comfortable and welcome.

As always, if you have any questions or comments about this or other Tech topics, please direct them to itsupport@cersd.org. We're "here" to help! :-)

* Zoom requires a person be the designated transcriber – this is a manual function that requires some setup from your website user console.